Which as some running a website raises a fascinating question. If Google is just going to crawl my sites and present information as an AI summary on their site, then what exactly do I gain by allowing Googlebot to crawl my sites?
A couple of years back I worked with a company which maintained specific data which was the main traffic driver on that page.
Google approached them and wanted to pay for the rights to get the data and display it on top of the search results, a feature which was fairly new back then.
This was an interesting dilemma because it was very clear that the money was way less than the loss in ad revenue due to traffic drop, but it was also clear that if we wouldn’t take the deal, a more desperate competitor would, which would result in the same traffic loss but without the extra google money.
So the company took the deal.
History repeats itself here, with the difference that instead of paying for the data, the ai crawlers simply take it for free.
That's the problem with the current monopolistic system, the money won't go down the stream, it's like a dam. One big dam owned by a few people is worse than many small dams
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 become increasingly useful when our personal AIs plug into them to search for the right info.
That said, I think the old internet business model is dying. Why will people write articles and pay for hosting if they can't receive any advertising revenue? I think I'm okay with this. Before advertising decimated the free internet, people ran sites for fun. Maybe we return to that.
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://hackertimes.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.
Anecdotally, I find Google's AI Search results to be genuinely helpful much of the time, and the box isn't so intrusive that it prevents me from digging into literal search results if I am not satisfied with the AI summary.
>> but how does their advertising model work when people expect summarised and accurate information instead of scrolling pages of ads?
1) because that fancy summarised results page will effectively be the ad. The results will push you towards google's partner sites or promote behavior benificial to them.
2) because partners may soon be able to pay to change the results of searches. Who won an election 20 years ago? That "fact" from the AI could depend on which answer has been sponsored by which political interest. What happened in china in 1989 ... how much money do you have?
3) the user becomes the product. No ads in search results, but our searches and online behavior tracked by them will be sold to whoever is most interested in what we do online.
Hanging my comment here, not blaming the parent poster, it's just relevant...
All the "AI search" I've tried is far less relevant than a proper search, using search engines without it seems much faster and more relevant.
Whenever I get AI search results, its summaries lack substance, are often just plain wrong, and so on. When I check, it's often usong the wrong aggregate data to return results.
Search engines these days, traditional ones, have been hobbled by targeting the lowest common denominator. They drop search terms, alias them (eg, Joe=Joseph,Josephene, Jodiene), and thus return endless bad results.
Using "web" search on Google, for example, putting all search terms in quotes, helps enormously. If searching for Joe Baker, you don't want aliased responses.
My point is, AI is yet another abstracted layer. It not only aliases things, it halucinates, and further, it doesn't even show the context it simply summarizes.
It's the next layer of crappiness.
As a side note, there os a
product in my home country called the Swiffer. It is like a broom, but uses disposable sticky paper instead of broom bristles and a scoop.
Point is, it isn't very environmentally friendly. I weirdly see environmentalists using it, instead of just a good old broom.
And now I see environmentalists using AI for search. What? Why! The sheer additional power and cost, all the new datacenters, hardware, just for what??
Even of one believes it is mildly better (which it isn't, if you use traditional search properly), are you now replacing your broom with a swiffer?!
The amount of environmentalism that goes out the window, for convenience, astonishes me.
While I agree in principle, I think it was inevitable. People been gaming SEO for so long that even with judicious use of search operators, it was getting harder to find the things I wanted (probably drowned in a sea of spam in such a way as to fall outside of the optimized search index). It _looks like_ the AI overview does not have this problem (yet...).
I’ve experienced the opposite. I get good summaries with links for original sources when something seeems off, which it almost never does. I also like that I can glance to see where the data came from.
Several months ago, I was getting hallucinations and silly answers, like Jaco Pastoreous being the bass player for Metallica.
but lately it’s been great. Especially for technical syntax stuff, like asking for syntax on a jq command, or sal syntax, or something trivial like movie casts members….
Edit: I also assume there’s now some pre-processing filter to retrieve answers from a cache or something, because I’m getting pretty long answers very quickly….
>All the "AI search" I've tried is far less relevant than a proper search, using search engines without it seems much faster and more relevant.
I've had the opposite experience with Perplexity Pro. Yesterday it took just under nine minutes to deliver a detailed and accurate answer as to the nearest locations where I can buy Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses (at least 3 hours drive away FWIW) that day.
In the past several months I've spent countless hours using search engines with dismal results that weren't close to that.
It is totally dependant on context. Ask about product purchases/prices and it will give you great results. Ask for basic data and it will quote wikipedia or government websites all day. Ask for a coding solution and it will spit out answers ripped from the corners of github. But i asked google about hydrogen-3 recently and got back a result saying that we were mining it on the moon. An entire space economy was invented because AI cannot tell scifi from reality.
The real test: dont test AI by asking it questions you already know. Ask it a proper question and then go out and find the answer yourself. That is where AI really falls down, the non-trivial stuff.
I've noticed something of a hybrid of what you posted and what one of your responders below posted.
For average results, that can have an acceptable answer that tends to the mean or societal mainstream views along some subject, the google answer works for me. For others, which are well unfortunately most of my queries these days, the google answer is brainwashing and propaganda. It feels little more than a continuation of the SARS-COV-2 era fact checkers which were actually failed attempts at propaganda machines for enforcing certain views as true while others were cited as "evidence does not suggest" (hand selecting the evidence of course means this is nothing more than confirmation bias).
I think the AI technology used in most LLM models is an acceleration of this- it will tout mainstream views or hand-picked views as truth while calling others false. And without an ability to search any more for opposing views, you get left with a really warped view of reality that might work for most. Though not for everyone.
Regarding a swiffer: it's a zero sum game. Where did the materials come from? The earth. Where did they return after use? The earth. The only thing changed was the energy used to create and transport them.
If conserving energy was important, none of these AI datacenters would be built, none of our items would be shipped across the planet from Asia. They would conserve energy and import raw materials only.
That's a pretty sinister system when the dam builders are suing the work of those downstream to build their damn. What happens when everyone downstream has been starved to death?
The very people calling the shots have so far been the most removed from the consequences of their actions. They have no incentive to be responsible or considerate of others.
> But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right?
No. It may be good for the consumer right now, but not ultimately (and on top of that, I would argue that reducing everyone to a consumer is already the wrong framing -- you need to ask what's good for the citizens). Having ten competing supermarkets with various interweaving supply lines is ultimately much better than having one giant supermarket, because that one monopolist is able to squeeze both consumers and suppliers to the detriment of both.
Do you think Walmart’s prices are higher than you’d pay if there were just ten competing stores with the same product mix, each of which did not have the leverage to squeeze suppliers?
It doesn't matter what Walmart's prices would be -- because there'd be nine alternatives offering their products at different price points. Also, you seem to be implying that suppliers are inhuman and deserve to be squeezed (but Walmart somehow deserves all the wealth it extracts as a middle-man, go figure), which is exactly why I said that focusing on consumers only is a myopic view of the world.
But google won’t give you the recipe. It’ll give you a pretty piece of text that resembles a recipe. You’ll only find out it’s not a recipe when it fails to produce a cake.
But then, the sites it's training on are starting to do the same thing, so maybe it won’t matter. Just last night, I pulled up four sites with “gluten free almond cake” recipes. One specified less than 1/4 the flour it would have needed, and another didn’t have any butter in the ingredients list. I had to eyeball the median and tweak from experience to actually get a bakable cake out.
I'm not going to drive to the bookstore only to find out the recipe I need twice a year is not there because the local cousine doesn't even know the ingredients.
Oh, maybe I should drive to the major city and check several bigger bookstores?
Or order it online? But that would be from the third country because this one is weirdly blind to variety. That will be €20 for a book and some €10 postage.
You're sure I can just get my recipe from the store?
Completely unrelated to AI, I buy and always bought recipe books in second hand bookstores. It has this vintage vibe, and not everything has to be kale. Downside is that some ingredients aren't easily reachable, but it doesn't happen that often.
I kinda think everyone should have an old school "joy of cooking", where they have instructions on skinning rabbits and squirrels, just as a reference that things weren't always like this not even that long ago.
Online grocery shopping service I use has added recipes to their website. Not obvious slop at first reading but then you see stuff like add 600g of carrots and 100ml of water to make a quite watery soup according to the picture.
The only solution is to find recipe books that were printed in previous decades.
Which is ironic, given that Google's entire value proposition (to users) was extracting signal from noise...
... and now it's come full A/B-advertising-optimization to being useless at that, when the need is greater than ever.
Imho, Google's greatest failing was missing how its own incentives warped creation of new web content, and failing to account for that strategically -- it turned the web into something it can't itself usefully parse.
We have a distinct poverty when it comes to secondary considerations and long term ramifications - which used to be manageable when progress was slower. Now, we're on a very steep acceleration/progress curve, and any shortsighted mistakes cause extremely large ramifications. Which are then compounded by both more short sighted non-fixes and our rapid acceleration/progress curve layering in additional confusion, misunderstandings, omissions of critical information.
What kind of insanity are you all talking about? Plenty of cook book authors out there with good recipes, tested, big-personal brand, etc. no need to go to prior decades for good books.
You need to compensate for not adding it though. The recipe without was literally the same ingredient list as the site it copied, just missing a line.
And almond flour does its thing by carmelizing in combination with butter and sugar, turning your whole cake into a sort of giant macaron. You can’t pull it off without any one of those things.
Without some way to generate revenue, people aren't going to publish recipes (for Google to scrape into their AI.) Maybe we could live without more recipes being fed into the machine, but there are many other types of content that will suffer the same fate.
It would be nice to find something better than an ad-revenue driven web, but I'm not sure this is it. We'll find out I guess...
Those who won’t were doing it for the money. Those who continue are those who do it for passion, or those whose recipe is just a way to attract people to their business (e.g. kitchenware company). I don’t think it is necessarily bad, the quantity will decrease but the quality may even improve
I built a passion reference site. A large part of that passion came from knowing and talking to the people I was helping. One person emailing or saying thanks would later help power me through to create more useful articles. Enriching openai/claude/ms/google and no thanks from an individual, has disincentivized me from writing more.
Same here. People knew the website and it was immensely flattering to meet users in the wild. It motivated me to really sweat the small stuff, because people noticed. Now I'm just feeding the slop machine, and it feels pointless.
We just won't get countless recipe websites where you have to scroll, scroll, scroll through slop about someone's day to read a scraped recipe that every other website has.
Does the current Google search results indicate that they will be any different?
It’s also not disruption if your product relies on the output of the industry it kills. What will AI train on when it destroys the economics of sharing information with others?
From the HN guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
In this instance, the internet is more than top-ranking recipe websites.
> But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right?
No because it's killing competition and becoming an even more obvious monopoly. Then at any occasion they have to choose between consumers and profits, they'll do what shareholders want and increase profits.
Not really good for consumers in the long term.
Creates a monopsony (monopoly on the buyer side instead of seller side) in the supply chain, with all the same negative externalities to competition.
Same reason its not good to have a "company town" where 1 company is the major employer to 50% of the workers.
It's not uncommon for free things to be higher quality than cheap things, especially when we're not talking about physical goods. Think hobbyist vs hack. Selective pro bono vs quantity over quality. The former describes old internet while the latter describes much ad-supported internet. I'm not saying cheap is better than expensive, and I'm not saying everything works this way, but I do think many things do, especially for pure information that doesn't have a major capital cost associated.
Not even the summary of the recipe, I think a lot of the "value" AI provides is decluttering the interface. All these perverse incentives conspire to make it undesirable for web publishers to simply show you a cake recipe. They need to meet SEO metrics for being higher on googles index, they need to monetize with ad and chum boxes. They need to distract and dazzle your senses. In the end, AI strips all these anti patterns out and shows you the meat. Or the "summary" of what should have been there all along. The "AI" isn't learning about what the words mean, it's stripping out cruft and filler that was deliberately added!
I'm not saying LLMs are worthless, but I'm saying if you had a magic browser add-on that simply stripped the BS out and showed you the relevant content, it would meet the use cases of the majority of people using AI (regarding search).
Said differently, Google are bringing you a solution to a problem they (largely) created.
>History repeats itself here, with the difference that instead of paying for the data, the ai crawlers simply take it for free.
This discussion was broached originally when discussing whether or not search engines and aggregators had any compensation obligation in respect of news articles. This was a hot topic in the IP and policy circles for a few years.
When the Canadian government attempted to create a mechanism to compensate content creators for the scraped content, there was widespread outrage from tech circles, despite the same community agreeing, across extensive policy discussions, that action had to be taken to prevent this universal man-in-the-middle value capture by search engines.
I've had fairly extensive discussion with the individuals involved in the academic, policy and internal industry analysis of the issue. Watching industry agree to address the issue, then aggressively spend to shape public narratives in public was eye opening.
The recent shift into "AI is obviously going to hoover up all your data and there's nothing you can do now that the theft is laundered through an LLM" is just the latest example of the same trend of short sighted capital-over-everything decision making we've become used to in jurisdictions that have dysfunctional legislatures.
That doesn't feel like a repetition at all? You said that the first time there was "traffic loss but without the extra google money", but that this time there's no extra google money either way.
The fact is that internet is already "tech giants own realm": the power is way beyond public imagination and affects all of us in real life on daily bases, but there are still people thinking they are not the "evil one" here.
It's a catch-22. Without google crawling your site, you don't get any new traffic. But with google crawling your site, you also might not get any traffic.
AI summarization has already causes issues for sites like rtings where people are no longer visiting the site but still making use of the data presented there. Leading to rtings not getting enough traffic to continue to post their data.
It is an existential crisis for websites and when they go away it'll be an existential crisis for AI.
> Without google crawling your site, you don't get any new traffic. But with google crawling your site, you also might not get any traffic.
I may be strange and unusual, but I just have never cared about my Google ranking. I know this makes me out of the ordinary among site owners but I have been humming along fine.
This certainly will disrupt traffic but for some of my sites I honestly think this is a good thing. I want you to want to be there, not just stumble upon my site because you happen to hit the right search keyword. Plus if it gets bad, this does create a new opportunity for others with cross linking and search.
Only issue is what happens when the company that owns the search and has a dominant share of the browser market flags your site with the good old "warning: potential risk ahead" when people try to reach it directly? And buries the "I know the risk let me through" deep in the browser settings. Advocate for different browsers? Google is pushing web attestation in one form or the other. I wish the future would look bleak, because right now it's looking blue, red, yellow and green and it's worse.
Don't forget that other browsers also just use googles web good boy list and if you report false positives point you towards google and cover their ears.
> Only issue is what happens when the company that owns the search and has a dominant share of the browser market flags your site with the good old "warning: potential risk ahead" when people try to reach it directly?
My target market is more technical then that so likely, nothing would change for me. Again, I recognize the impact of Google's dominance for some, but if the "attestation" isn't helpful and only hinders using services that people have come to rely on, there will be push back.
I also have been advocating for years for everyone in my circle to avoid using Chrome. A homogenized browser market is a risk, and Chrome is the new IE. I hope you are also a part of the effort to advocate for browser diversity.
Yes! However most of my users were established through my network, not search.
I know that sites relying on ad income will and are being hurt tremendously by this effort on Google's part. However, if you are in the startup space and make money on services you offer, search should be one of several strategies you are deploying for user growth.
Step 1, Google serves info directly and consumers rejoice
Step 2, Google extinguishes the web and nobody has a reason to publish content, consumers lament but are trapped, Google has created a platform to serve content instead of links
Step 3 (or maybe 2a), Google is now monetizing their content machine
Step 4, Google offers people a way to contribute to the content machine, make some $$ per N views, whatever. People create content within the ecosystem
Step 5, Google is now the internet, more content is created overall, quality is lower overall perhaps, algorithmic echo chambers flourish even more than today, old heads on HN lament, everyone else just goes on living
Since "making money with free content" essentially means manipulating your users into spending more money elsewhere from which you then get some indirect kickbacks, I don't think we need to lament there being fewer opportunities for that particular business model. That's not to say that video centralization doesn't have other actually bad effects.
With google search you don't get money for creating content as people rely on summary provided by the search.
Imagine people would go to youtube and watch previews of your videos solely; or the preview is your video, but condensed and given preferential treatment.
> With google search you don't get money for creating content as people rely on summary provided by the search.
I'm aware. And I'm curious how that will play out. Because same as with Youtube, historically Google Search gave the means and the discoverability to monetize producing valuable free content.
Youtube is directly dependent on people producing free content. If Youtube wouldn't pay its creators as well as it does, it would simply die.
Same with Google Search. Good content and good SEO gives the means for websites with free content to survive. Google usually takes a cut on ad placement on those pages with AdSense.
If Google Search now doesn't pay content creators as well as it used to, what will happen to free content on the web? It's bad for Google and it's bad for the creators.
As far as I know, Tiktok pays significantly less than Youtube. But yes, TikTok is a thing, as well as Twitch.
Still, it's all very centralized platforms, which historically isn't the case for all the monetized free content you usually get from google search (reviews, recipes, travel guides, converter sites etc. etc.)
Stack Exchange committed suicide by closing all the questions. It was already in a steep decline before LLMs, after it got bought by private equity and did things like firing the moderators.
> Without google crawling your site, you don't get any new traffic
What about the stories of marketing managers who learned months after the fact that their credit card had expired and their google ad spend had ceased with no affect on traffic? Google isn't always an effective promotional vehicle.
Sounds like a pretty ineffective manager: wasn’t buying the correct ad placement in the first place, used a personal card to sign up for an ostensibly corporate service, didn’t keep track of expiration dates for the card, and was also ignoring email notifications from Google about the expired card. Let me know if I’m missing any other reasons why this manager should be fired instantly.
Nah. Pretty sure he was using a personal card - corporate finance dept would likely better track where each card is being used and their expiration dates to avoid this happening. Also this better tracks with the rest of his sloppy behavior.
Well in addition to what you wrote, the marketing manager ALSO wasn't tracking any ad-related marketing performance indicator (CTR, CR, etc.) in any measurable way for very long periods of time... or they would have caught it almost immediately ("wow ad spend, CTR and CR have all suddenly gone down to 0/0% and have been staying there for days on all our campaigns! What's up with that?").
Internet is more and more becoming a commercialization platform. If you are selling something on your website, you still want Google (or ChatGPT for that matters) to expose customers to your product. The gate is the actual delivery of the product is behind a purchase/signup.
Google and others want to control the entire customer journey, to the point the your website is simply a way to pass metadata to them. They are actually achieving this!
this kills the entire internet vibe of the 90s, early 2k
> is more and more becoming a commercialization platform
FTFY: "couple of decades since has become". The vibes of passion-driven 1990s started to be overwhelmed by the din of money right when the Internet has become a major commerce venue, some time in early 2000s.
Maybe it's time to think about alternative ways to market your products, if search engine ranking and SEO got broken. I have no idea how, I don't need or do that, but it seems we're past breaking point.
You're allowed to exist on the web. The alternative is you are pushed out, your site is not indexed and google / chrome labels it as a security risk when people are trying to reach it directly. The mandate is clear: give up the data or give up the spot.
It was exactly my opinion after thinking about this for a while. This is essentially Google making their search engine into yet another website. Sure, there is certain inertia - people used to using Google - but it will fade out with new generations. They've shot themselves in the foot, they just don't see it yet, and it will take some time for it to become obvious.
You search for a term and then you watch videos until you're satisfied. I don't think it's a very good way to learn about a topic, but millions of people seem to disagree with me. It makes more sense when you remember that 21% of the American population is functionally illiterate.
If your site is all about disseminating information (like Wikipedia), then Google would provide a free mirror of sorts.
If your site is about your product, Google won't be able to serve the sign-up page from AI; the traffic would come your way. Same for a site that sell something: the traffic you're interested in would arrive at your checkout page.
Paid-content sites and ad-supported sites are screwed though, on top of their being screwed by archive.is and ad blockers.
The really confusing part about the ad-supported sites is that most of them are supported by Google's ad products. So Google is eating their own lunch here.
Search Engine Result Page (SERP) ads shown on Google itself are far more valuable than display ads that get shown on random websites. Google has been slashing payouts to those sites for over a decade. More recentlt, they've been slashing search impressions to those sites as well. With search engine ads + Youtube ads + Play Store ads, they can probably cut out the third - party site ads business altogether and not miss a beat.
Sites pay good money to appear on top search results. Looks like the future is going to be sponsored AI sources. It's going to be even more difficult to figure out if google is presenting you with actual information instead of just an ad
I write things on the internet because I want to share ideas. If someone reads my post and tells a friend, that's great. If an AI crawls my posts and passes along the ideas that's great too.
(It doesn't work for ad-funded writing, but while I have substantial sympathy there this has historically been an unpopular argument on HN)
Sure but this means that you’re no longer eligible to make living from your ideas, which can be fine by you but it eliminates entire class of people who used to
make living from intellectual work.
This also could have been fine, it can bring back authenticity however for this to happen no one should be making money from it. Instead, only megacorps make money and they can just ignore your ideas and generate theirs. They control the distribution and the supply now.
Not making a living from ads specifically, sure, but many have things like Substack which actually directly incentivizes them to make good content rather than serving ads.
Sharing ideas with people is nice, the actual problem is your ideas in this case are just a vehicle for generative AI companies to monopolize access to information and control our own cognitive processes, which is not entirely something new but it feels like we are now moving backwards: from free access back to ministry of truth days
Setting aside ad-driven revenue - the ideas, when spat out by an llm, are disconnected from the author. If people like your ideas, they aren’t becoming fans/followers/long-term-readers. That means good luck leveraging some interesting writing into a book, a speaking tour, a podcast, or even any kind of consistent readership. The llm slurps up your content and monetizes it while you get nothing.
I'm not interested in a book, speaking tour, or podcast. I've never had consistent readership because I write about too many unrelated things. I blog because I have ideas I want to share; I don't feel at all ripped off.
Speaking as someone who is a bit more familiar with your site, the variety of content you post is really valuable. I know multiple people, myself included, who have either gone from EA to Contra or Contra to EA thanks to both being on your blog.
More broadly, I love it when an author I trust in one area writes about other topics.
Fair enough, sounds like you won’t be impacted. But the vast majority of people i read online are able to write the content i enjoy because there are paths to earn a living off it. I expect the future of llm search will leave only hobbyists and slop producers standing.
It should have been a clear extension of the intent of existing copyright/licensing that training would be disallowed without consent, but "move fast and break things"/"possession is nine-tenths of the law" win out
Copyright already exists, the issue is that these companies are doing it legally anyway. For me it is the same issue as with privacy: I'm deeply uncomfortable with the current situation, but there is no political fight for me to fight, because the law is already how I want it to be, it's the public perception, that needs to change, but that is hard to influence, without being rich.
There are other ways to block robots from crawling our sites. I have a robots.txt but place no faith in it, it’s just there because it’s cheap and does stop some of the crawlers.
Depends on what you're trying to do. Sell ads over your content? Probably not great. Sell goods? Still good for you. Become influential and spread ideas? Good for you.
Honestly, a majority of news media are just AI generated content (echo chambers). I personally feel Dead Internet Theory is true and has arrived already.
Free speculation: I could see a future where Google populates a footer on results with the website logos of the sources. Presumably, the new web will require users to memorize websites/brands and go directly to those sites if they see a lot of their results are being provided by one source.
Websites may go back to being simply labors of love.
> Websites may go back to being simply labors of love.
The situation may be even worse. Back in the labor of love era, at least webmasters could get feedback from readers. In the LLM era, readers may not even know that the site exists. Without feedback/community, the overall quality of those sites will decrease over time.
> ChatGPT/Claude does this today. I barely click or care for the source when they already have me the info I wanted.
Maybe I'm just #builtdifferent, but I click these a lot. Especially if I'm trying to research or make a decision on something, I want the actual source and not the potentially-fudged summary.
It seems like they should have a model similar to YouTube. If I watch a video on YouTube made by someone, they get a little cash, and it ads up.
Similarly, if I use Gemini uses a website for an answer, it should pay something to those sites for the information it gathered. Sites would need to sign up to earn via Google, and I'd imagine there would be a certain threshold to cross to make it worth cutting checks... but that would make all these AI search tools feel much less scummy while providing site owners an incentive to keep sharing information on the internet.
Where a model like this would get messy is with sites like reddit. It's a very popular source for AI search, but the value comes from the users, not the platform itself.
Actually it cannot work this way, content creators make far more money from ads in the video itself compared to the one yt gives them. If it were for yt money alone basically we will still be in the 2010 yt: folks that doing it just for fun.
The problem with all this AI/llm stuff is that end users doesn't even know your tiny site with a lot of useful information exists at all.
> The problem with all this AI/llm stuff is that end users doesn't even know your tiny site with a lot of useful information exists at all.
This depends on implementation. I primarily use Kagi for any LLM stuff. I cites pretty much everything and links out to the source. I regularly use this for search. The normal search results may not have what I need, but a line in the AI results sounds better and I click through to the source to get more context.
I find clicking through to the source is important, as I've often seen the AI get it wrong. The page has what I need on it, but the AI grabbed the wrong thing and got it backward. I'm probably in the minority, I'm guessing most people don't use LLMs like this.
Maybe there are some exceptions, but my[0] behaviour changed a lot in the last 3 years:
- in the past Google was the entry point for everything, I was opening every single site at the top of my search and navigate through it. E.g.: if the site was a Reddit or HN post I was reading comments, following links, ecc
- today I'm using google 1 in 3 times and I mostly read the "AI Overview" section. The other 2 out of 3 I go directly into chatgtp, claude or gemini and rarely follow any links.
[0] But I see the same pattern basically in all of my colleagues, friends and relatives.
Google's AI summaries already do this. I occasionally click through to see the underlying source the AI summary leaned on to generate the response, but probably only ~20% of the time.
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.
The expected purpose of websites is to spread information, so whether users get it by making a request to your website or to Google is irrelevant. In fact, if they get it from Google it's better because it reduces website load.
If instead the purpose of your website is to manipulate users for financial gain (for instance by showing media attempting to manipulate their purchasing decisions, after receiving a bribe from a vendor), and the information is just a way to lure users, then maybe this malicious business model will finally be no longer possible.
On the one hand, this is an interesting observation. The internet as it exists today is filled with product placement slop and real information is a rare commodity. The loss of these kinds of sites is a blessing.
On the other hand, Google played a big role in creating this problem in the first place. The search results have trended downwards towards this kind of SEO slop for the last 10 years and Google has been unable (or unwilling) to fix it. Plus, the AI results Google shows are not free from commercial influence and will probably only get worse in this regard. Except now this money will flow to Google instead of $random_internet_spammer. I don't know if that's any better.
The idea that Google won't eventually "manipulate users for financial gain" with Gemini is comically naive. That's how they're going to make money from this thing.
As far as I know, you don't have a choice. They have no obligation to respect your wishes, and LLMs are legally allowed to scrape & republish your content.
Sending them a zip bomb didn't cause harm. It was their choice to unzip it. Is jwz liable if a child sees his testicle eggcup macro when visiting via HN?
> then what exactly do I gain by allowing Googlebot to crawl my sites?
The counter argument is that sites are becoming more AI slop or may intentionally provide poison they don’t want to train on. There may be a cut off date after which training must be carefully curated; and the main body of data has already been collected.
Sites may still get traffic from agents searching for current information. Maybe even the resurgence of RSS? One can dream.
Maybe you want your ideas to spread? If your sites purpose is getting ad impressions then yea no point. But if your purpose is to spread ideas then it is still useful.
I have spent nine years putting out free information. Surely you realise that I have to pay rent and buy food while I do it?
My income isn’t ads, just getting a cut of the sale on the complex products I help you buy. Even that sort of curation takes time and effort.
Even for all the things I do for free without any revenue whatsoever - most of it, really - I do want to feel some recognition. I don’t want the interaction to be mediated by an advertising company.
It's worse than that. They train their models preferentially on what they consider to be high-quality data. But if you look at the usual "references" on search queries, they're often just a post-hoc BS justification that links to spam blogs or Tiktok videos.
Mechanisms might exist to make you think you have one, the same way copywrite should prevent millions of books being gobbled up by TheZuck but ultimately do you really have a choice?
Yes, Google advertises its crawler IP ranges and it is quite easy to keep track of this and block them. But only if you control the infrastructure that your site runs on of course.
It has reduced traffic to my website by around 65%. I live from that website. My income is a function of the traffic it gets.
I spent 9 years of my life putting hard-earned information on the internet, and now big tech uses it to enrich themselves while putting me out of work. Even my backup plan - software development - is being devalued to hell. It's so damn depressing. We'll get the internet that we deserve.
Over the past year to 1.5 years, in the sites I run, I have seen a drop in traffic from Google, which leveled off, and is now slightly rising.
I think if you look through this thread you’ll see a lot of skepticism of the AI results, and I think that is a fairly broadly held opinion. The obvious way to check the AI answer is to click through to some sources.
I think for Google to stop sending me traffic, it would have to be essentially perfect at AI answers. It will never get there, especially as so many searches are opinion-based like “what is the best mobile phone right now.”
That article is not even two years old… “for a few years” make it sound like he saw it coming long before it started. He’s just describing a trend and its ineluctable destination.
But I do agree it will be or already is a paradigm shift. And a painful one.
Yes, but this just shows how google is not repeating mistakes of the Kodaks and Blockbusters of the world.
They keep innovating even if it means cannabilizing their main revenue stream. Which increases the chances that you will not still be stuck producing film emulsions while everyone else is slowly making bank doing digital.
Websites will die on the vine if LLMs intermediate all the content.
The "website" of the future will be an API optimized for LLM crawlers, serving plain-text content that no end-user will ever view directly. The SEO game will change to LLMAO.
Alternatively, we can collectively "fight back" by not using Google and teaching others around us to do so as well. There are plenty of decent [1] and great (better) alternatives, where you're not the product [2]!
There is actually another way that was just hinted at a few days ago demonstrated by the EU courts reaffirming a law from 2019 against Meta, just force google et al to compensate publishers:
That translates to "Force Google to give money to these specific organizations and newspapers which EU leaders wish to benefit". It won't help any individuals who has made great websites with important and popular information.
Well that's just an example, You could mandate an API to allow bots pay their fair share; could ban google from using content it stole without compensation; could shatter google into a thousand pieces.. There are music rights organizations with small time artists to huge celebrities, they are strong organizations that collect revenue from big platforms and redistribute it to all artists as well. Lots and lots of ways to address this problem.
My appeal is just to realize that our implicit assumption that we can't do anything ever at all besides appealing to completely ineffectual individual action is in and of itself a strongly ideological and politically radical position to take.
It's possible to do that easily: By putting your content behind a paywall. Google can't access that legally. That's how book authors have won in court against both Google and the AI giants.
That also requires new ways to think about how you sell content online. Mass syndication has been very successful for music and video content, and much more.
> Websites will die on the vine if LLMs intermediate all the content.
The current zeitgeist of them will, but I think not all.
My first website (GeoCities) was either before Google existed or very close to it. Connected to people via WebRings and directory listings. More recently, RSS feeds.
Yeah there will likely continue be a small underground of old-style websites I guess. But you'll have to be in the loop on how to find them, and very few people will pay to advertise on them.
We had internet before we had browsers, then the browser took over as the main method of consuming the internet. It has a lot of problems and e.g. mobile apps are trying to fill the void, but they have their own problems. Next stage is the personal assistant agent, which will be the single entry point to the internet.
HN blocks AI or otherwise alters the data. I tried summarizing a thread last week and Claude reported it only got a handful of entries. I saved the page as a pdf and Claude was able to process it.
Real human discussions will be gold going forward. HN should be paying us actually.
That's an insightful prediction! Agentic LLMs won't only replace the browser, they will also optimize and enhance the content that you should consume. Would you like us to go deeper into how human comments and conversations on HN submissions will also become obsolete thanks to AI?
Here is what I think the future web may look like:
1) Sites will have mcp / APIs for LLMs. So that when I ask my AI Agent du jour. It can call any of the sites where I have subscriptions for information.
2) Sites that are passion projects will be harvested by our LLM overlords.
3) Sites that people don't type into their web browser and need ad revenue will die.
4) SEO will finally die.
I recently search for some generic home appliance term and google's AI Overview blurb ended with "For more information about repairing home devices check samsung.com" (non clickable)
I am sure SEO companies will claim they can make that happen on purpose, and people will pay them for that.
Well I recently also repaired home appliance (washing machine with fault code).
Opened ChatGPT, photographed the machine because I didn't know concrete model, he saw the error code. I told that it also leaked prior to today and it just said: clean the filter.
Did it, and now it continues to work :)
Another bullet point: Father has older Audi, Battery drains fast. Some mechanic said him to check comfort control module - usually does that for those older cars.
While I was measuring how much Amps battery draws and let ChatGPT know what I'm doing, he also tells me the same stuff mechanic did. I hope that mechanic wasn't using ChatGPT :) Anyways, there was no current leak after ripping out comfort control module.
Or more likely move towards substack or newsletters where the pitch is - Don’t let the LLM chose the output for you, go directly to our Substack/newsletter instead.
This will happen especially with things like conspiracy theories because the choice might be to pollute the output or share the general consensus. Like searches for Apollo landing conspiracy theories can either chose to present “alternate facts” so that people can “do their own research” and conclude it is fake or LLM auto corrects to “Apollo landing happened”.
Newsletters have a webview fallback with a public URL that makes them just as susceptible to scraping. If that ever gets fixed, Google will just scrape the full-text content in Gmail instead.
Newsletters have been around forever and never taken off like the open web and free blogging have. Slapping a Stripe integration on the backend hasn't led to Substack becoming a sustainable business not propped up by VC cash.
* A large fraction of people are realizing that some search engines are soft-censoring, already;
* Another fraction of people will not accept AI agent slop as a replacement for website search;
* Another fraction of users will get annoyed/tired with not getting directed anywhere;
* Another fraction of users does not rely on AI-focused/AI-exclusive search engine.
Between the lot of those, the non-Google-covered Internet has, and will, live on. Yes, with _less_ traffic - nto _no_ traffic.
He also spins a lot of trash talk about an industry he's never personally worked in as any kind of engineer at all. He's a "Journalist Covering Tech" without a degree in journalism, so he's not even a "Tech Journalist"; might as well be the blogger character from Silicon Valley.
> Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from the University of Chicago.
His hot takes are best ignored, is just convenient click bait for their entire negativity angle.
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 provide the trusted facts, while independent websites are forced to shift into closed, subscription-only communities...
Tech analysts and digital economists refer to this transition as the "Siloed Web." Google's ultimate goal is no longer to help users explore the open internet; it is to keep users inside Google’s AI interface by using licensed corporate data as its foundation.
By pivoting to AI Overviews and corporate licensing deals, Google is effectively dismantling its own legacy. They are turning back into the 1995 version of Yahoo—a closed ecosystem that only serves "approved" corporate data, except this time the curation is done by an AI model trained on paid datasets rather than human editors."
I don't trust facts from LLMs. When I am searching for something, I usually want to find primary sources. As soon as a number is involved, I do my best to not even look at the AI output.
Even though the result is often good and combines information from multiple sources, it can also get things wrong by combining information from different eras or just plain outdated advice. AFAICT, without primary sources, the result is for entertainment purposes only.
> When I am searching for something, I usually want to find primary sources.
And therein lies the rub; for years now Google's search results have returned useless SEO garbage. For now, it definitely seems like an LLM answer is better than what was being returned and I guess this is the reason why Google ripped it out.
An LLM answer is not "better", it's in a completely different category. LLM answers can be useful, for topics where you can easily verify a fact (i.e if you ask for a Linux command and it gives you one, you can run it and see if it did what you wanted), or for topics which are more opinion than pure fact ("list some trade-offs between decision A and decision B"). But when you want information that's provided by some authoritative source, you want to see it from that source.
Google Search has been terrible for a long time. But you could still dig through it and find those primary sources. That is, in my opinion, the primary purpose of a search engine. Replacing it with what an LLM has invented based on ingesting both reliable and unreliable sources is not viable for a large category of things. The main way we can judge the reliability of something is to loo at where it comes from. If I'm looking for, say, official US job market statistics, whether I trust the numbers I find depends on whether I find them published on a US government website or on a random person's blog. A number presented to me by a chat bot would not let me judge, so it's useless.
The best a language model could possibly do, by definition, is to find websites and link them to me, letting me judge their credibility. But then it's just a worse search engine.
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.
The training process literally ingests the majority of text on the internet, including a huge volume of SEO garbage, and seeks to create a self-consistent compressed model of that. This is totally imperfect of course but is also likely more truthful than the median Google result, because of the incentive for self-consistency and coherence that is created by the reward function as well as during RL.
Imagine that you had 1,000 years to read every Google result on a particular topic, and literally infinite patience. You would read a lot of rubbish but ultimately you are a smart person, you would figure out the underlying truth and likely produce something that is more valuable than the average or even the sum of the parts.
You can ask them to cite their sources. It's very good practice to do so, and to check those sources, because I've found that about 30-40% of the time their source doesn't support their answer at all.
Because it finds the sources much quicker than I would have been able to on my own, and I can then synthesize them into data I know is correct, as correct as any human-generated data can be of course.
No, it's usually because it finds sources that I would not have even thought to search for in the first place.
Agentic AI has its faults, but one thing I've found it to be very good at is surfacing the "unknown unknowns": things I didn't know I should have searched for but that are directly relevant to my problem.
Because way more than three out of five Google results are SEO garbage or sponsored crap. The bar has been set extremely low by Google, a 60% validity rate sounds magical.
If I'm going to an LLM (as with websearch before it), it's usually because I don't know the answer, don't have anyone close to me that knows the answer, and can't pay anyone (or don't know who to pay) for the answer. In other words, my failure rate without the LLM would be 100%.
It's much easier to determine the truth of an answer than it is to come up with that answer yourself. This is analogous to the P=NP problem or the recognition vs. recall problem: it is much easier to recognize and verify a correct answer than it is to recall or generate it yourself.
I've got a pretty solid algorithm for checking correctness: I ask the LLM for its sources, I try to find 3-5 independent ones (that are not just copying each others' answers), and if they all agree, that's very likely to be the correct answer. Simple math here: if you have 5 sources and they are each 60% likely to be correct, then an LLM choosing at random from them would have a 60% success rate, while someone checking all 5 of them for agreement would have a 1 - (0.4^5) = 99% chance of being correct. It's a good algorithm for doing other things like verifying scientific papers, too: you look for indendent research groups that have all reproduced the same findings.
I did the same thing with ten-blue-links websearch as well, and hope this would be the habit of anyone else too. (Although I know it wasn't, because I worked on Google websearch 15 years ago, on a project to increase the credibility of search results, and we did cafeteria UX studies about "What makes a credible result?" and everybody said "Because it appears as the top result on Google.")
I don't find it nearly that bad. If I really need factual information, it will generally go off and read the data from primary sources anyway. So unless it's really misunderstanding context, you're getting the data from the source.
It really matters the task. General knowledge from Wikipedia, great. Things more specific, with any thought needing to be used, or technical fields outside of software his numbers are pretty close to mine.
The problem too, is that we're all using different tools with different experiences -- there isn't one "AI". And if you're not paying for it, you're getting some real bad experience.
Because being right 60% of the time with minimal work is still amazing, as long as one accounts for the failure rate correctly.
Say I want to look up some game from my childhood, which I barely remember any details for. Going to google and trying is likely going to be very difficult unless I happen to get lucky with some key element. But if an LLM can get it right even a minority of the time, it can lead to me quickly finding the game I'm looking for.
This does depend upon the ability to evaluate the answer, like checking against source or some other option where you know a good answer from bad. If you can't, then it does become much more dangerous. Perhaps part of the reason AI seem to empower experts more than novices in some domains?
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 are.
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.
That might make sense (at least on the first order, second order effects would still be horrible) if the LLM generated answer was reliably correct. It isn't.
ChatGPT is the only bot that reliably cites sources (through Web search mode).
The other bots either make up links or simply don't provide any information that is distinguishable from the LLM predictive output.
Ironically Gemini is also very bad at this, while it should have been the best at Web search.
Gemini also does something very patchy, which is to provide "links" which are in fact GET queries into classic Google search. I'm guessing they did it this way because the links generated/hallucinated by the LLM were too unreliable.
Asking an LLM to cite sources just leads to hallucinated sources, same as any other attempt to make it explain its thinking process. It doesn't have actual visibility into its internal processes, just rationalizes an explanation.
Even before the AI era I slowly became less and less successful with google searches. Everything - non trivial / specific - that I looked for turned into a chore and I quickly gave up.
LLMs, that can supply valid links, give me a completely different variety of results. Either I am too dumb to search manually, too impatient or google search is just broken, but Gemini usually gives me something I can work with. I just wished I could blacklist some sources like medium.
Checkout Kagi. You can blacklist sites. You can also weight certain sites higher than others. I've been using it for almost a year at this point. When I'm forced to use Google at work, I am legitimately less effective at finding the information I need.
I've been paying for Kagi for like four years. I like it but also resent that it's something I pay for now when I remember how good Google was 20 years ago.
From the past hundreds of Google searches I've done where I got an AI summary, I'd say the result is actually rarely good. At the very least 80% of the outputs contain critical mistakes, often exactly about the specific thing you're asking.
Sometimes I use chatgpt thinking mode for searches when I expect there will be a lot of noise. "What are some in-depth reviews for <some book I've heard of>"
Have you tried explicitly asking for links to primary sources?
It's all slop. Look at the first two examples in their own announcement: fitness and wellness slop from websites like "top 11 exercises to do when you work from home", and god damn sneaker drops and what bloody influencers are saying about some celeb-endorsed sneaker. Jesus christ
I don't trust facts from humans. When I am searching for something, I usually want to find direct sensor readings. As soon as a number is involved, I do my best to not even look at the human output.
Even though the result is often coherent and confidently synthesizes information from multiple experiences, it can also hallucinate, suffer from recency bias, or accidentally merge memories from different decades. AFAICT, without access to the underlying telemetry, human responses are for entertainment purposes only.
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 the implicit (or even explicit) bias that can be smuggled into a chat in ways that simply aren't possible when you're just clicking through to an external source. There are all kinds of implications to Google no longer being that source of truth, even by default. Maybe this has quietly been the case for a long time, but this feels like the final move — pushing their ad bias (i.e., whoever paid the most) into a conversational system, where dark patterns are far easier to implement and much harder to detect.
One answer to this might be domain-specific agents — narrower, accountable, ideally something you (or your community) actually run. But even then it all falls back on trust: you being a good-faith actor, and others trusting that you are one. Which is to say, we're back to the same problem, just at a smaller scale.
With sponsored links and aggressive SEO, “Google it” has been falling apart as a source of facts for a long time.
There is an incredible gap in the search literacy between different users of Google. Some will accept what they find in the top links, no matter how dubious the source.
My takeaway is that the internet would be a dramatically cooler place today if people were just willing to pay for stuff.
The ad version of the web, where ~60% of people carry the ad burden for everyone, and defacto aligns the service providers with advertisers, is just a guaranteed bad outcome. The only real upside, which frankly people take for granted, is that the ad-web is classless web. Broke or rich you get the same (crappy) services.
I remember those mock web service package flyers from the net neutrality days. Where people made fake marketing material showing website packages you could access with different paid tiers, something reminiscent of the cable TV days.
Back then it was horrifying, but 20 years later, I think I would entertain a subscription to a wide array of web services if it meant they worked for me and not advertisers.
My other main issue with the no-net neutrality world is that it also means websites would have to pay ISP’s or be artificially throttled. That’s a huge problem.
It’s one thing to say we need to pay. It’s another for ISP’s to get 3 pulls at the hose (paid for a connection, paid for what we can browse, paid for who provides the sites) when some of those elements don’t even require more (or at least much) effort or infrastructure on their part. I don’t like the idea of their picking winners and losers. We’ve got enough of that as it is.
I'd be careful with the phrasing. Site owners paying more to get a faster connection is how business works. It's not neutral if it's anything more than the technical capacity of the connection or if they're restricting it, like unreasonably refusing to peer.
Peering is complicated too. It means an ISP carries your site's traffic without you paying them. Is that reasonable? I'd say common sense is: yes, if the traffic is only between you and the ISP's users, since the ISP is then getting paid. But who carries the cost of setting it up? Common sense would say the site operator should pay but the ISP shouldn't inflate the cost.
it’s not a faster connection issue. Bandwidth at your location is a different issue.
What I am talking about is websites that do not pay the toll being artificially slowed down. A pillar of neutrality is that “all packets are equal.” As long as we have stable connections and are using decent services, your blog should load as fast as any major news site. Without net neutrality, ISP’s can put their thumb on the scale and make it so your blog takes 5 second, 10 seconds, whatever they want. They can throttle load times despite both of us paying for high speeds and using quality services. Think: governors in golf carts, if you’re familiar with that. Under net neutrality this is not permitted.
I'm in no way arguing to get rid of net neutrality, it was mentioned purely to reference the common image circulating the internet back when it was a constant headline.
and even if it was, when a search engine takes you to another website, that site is also not bias free.
just becuase somebody publishes something on a website, does not make it a fact. google has always been good at finding things that look like facts, and their AI iteration is also good at that.
It’s not “reasonably unbiased” or whatever we want to call it. Even if we want to believe it’s possible, the very existence of SEO invalidates it. You push yourself to the top by using techniques that have little (often nothing if we’re honest) to do with the merits of the information. Rankings literally do not correlate with quality or lack of bias. It’s about the specific words you use, the way your site is formatted, engagement, etc. None of that is reflective of the quality of information.
As I said in another comment, just look at “Google bombing.” There was a time when people would mount public campaigns to artificially drive pages to be associated with certain words, like I remember when people made it so if you search “failure” you got “George W. Bush.”
To use a different example: it would be like saying we know the quality of a car because of how many units sold. The driving force could be many unrelated factors, like the visual aesthetics, the feel, etc. which don’t tell you anything about the MPG, the upkeep, and other info most of us would consider key indicators of quality.
For a long time there was a decent correlation with the quality of the information and how far up the Google search it sat. But you are putting way too much stock in the quality of that information. It has always required heavy scrutiny.
>I'm worried there will no longer be a bias-free source of information for the masses.
There was never anything bias-free about google search. It "ranks" information based on all sorts of qualities. At our most generous we can call it somewhat of a "consensus" check. Historically it was a tool for quickly getting you in the vicinity of an answer that most would consider correct.
Remember "google bombing"? Hell SEO alone invalidates any assertion that google search is a valid source of truth and that's be going on for a long time.
I agree with the sentiment, but native ads i.e. blogs, reviews, articles, etc. that do their best to hide that they’re a sponsored product review have been around for a long time. Admittedly, LLMs WILL make it even more difficult to discern the difference.
Yes, but not because of facts or bias-free sources. It was the equivalent of staring deep at your wrist watch while someone's speaking: a clear signal that you were done with whatever they wanting to talk about.
I kinda like that "let me Google it for you" in Japan was more popular as "Google it loser" (ググレカス), a rare instance where the common phrases was more expressive than it's western counterpart.
Google has been actively biasing their search results for commercial purposes for decades, and have for quite a while been censoring or soft-censoring results for political reasons. WSWS' Andrei Dimon wrote about this extensively back in 2017, and I believe it also made the mainstream press once or twice - but has been mostly glossed over.
I understand why they are doing this. My Google search usage is easily down 50%+. I doubt I am unique here.
While there are times where I want pure search (Kagi, Old Google) I mostly use LLMs to search now and have them provide me links for source data.
When I do use LLMs as a search engine I always want it integrated into my AI workflows with access to tools and scripts etc. I never want to have a conversation with a website that is geared towards advertising me products.
I'm not at all in the same boat as you; I do not and likely will never primarily rely on LLMs for information. But it's fascinating to hear that even folks who do don't find this approach useful.
For me, Google search results have gotten so poor (and other engines aren’t any better), that I’d rather just ask an online LLM for what I’m looking for.
I was once very good at advanced Google search queries but they seem to no longer respect such queries - either showing irrelevant results or none at all (that should exist).
I don’t love LLMs, but they seem to not make up stuff very often these days and usually cite links to what they summarized. Sometimes the tone of the summary is slightly wrong “algorithm X was designed for Y” (when I know it wasn’t) but it’s otherwise very close to the mark.
What does amaze me, is the LLM seems to “understand” my question with very little context — I would have to give a human many more details about goals/intent.
I know damn LLMs are not capable of thought and are just a glorified search engine, but they do it well. Perhaps all my education made me little more…
I used to mock Sci-Fi movies where characters lazily dictated questions to the computer and it gave high quality answers.
As a user and fan of kagi, the problem with kagi is that it reveals how badly degraded the web is.
The vast majority of original content is now in one or another social network or on discord. News articles are an exception, though the news has its own problems. Some wikis still exist and are actively maintained, of course, but not a ton. If it's a topic that's academically studied you might find information in papers, but those have poor web visibility and are better located with specialty tools. LLMs seem to be quite good at locating papers, though.
When you run a website where 80% of users are ad-blocking, and less than 0.5% donate, you quickly realize why these centralized websites (which turned apps to force ads) are the only survivors.
I think it's less expense-driven and more user-driven. Most forums I frequented in the 2000s were funded by donations. The userbase, though, disappeared. The network effects of facebook and reddit and such are hard to overcome, and worse when you consider how google search prefers to surface either social media sites or blogspam/content theft sites.
I've used Kagi for a few years but it's gotten significantly worse for me the last year or so. I'm curious if anyone else has seen the same thing happen. I'll search for something and usually see a bunch of barely relevant SEO sites. Avoiding this is why I started paying for Kagi in the first place, so it's been disappointing to see. Marginalia Search (https://marginalia-search.com/) seems to be better at finding content written by humans rather than SEO specialists, but it's not a silver bullet (for example, the last time I checked they didn't index non-English sites).
Been using Kagi search for more than a year. Been happy. I use GPT/et al for the little things (e.g. unit conversions, rather than search for and then try to use an enshittified web page from 10 years ago). But for actual real tech leaning content, Kagi has been pretty good.
A lot of unit conversions are just built into Kagi (and Google!). "Searching" for "10nzd in usd" gives me a price, "10kg in lb" gives me a converted unit, etc.
Yep, really advanced Google searches were never that good. LLM, yeah, it halucinates, it's never spot on but as sure as heck it knows what I'm trying to ask. It doesn't give me arborists if I say something like "list tree searches".
LLMs-as-search-proxies have some pretty nice capabilities. For instance you can say "limit your search to scientific papers" and they'll do a much nicer job. I've also had some success recently prompting them with "I'm looking for reputable sources", e.g. recently I was looking for ways to repel deer from my apple tres. A naive internet search had vendors of shady crap jumping me. The LLMs pulled up relevant papers and university extension programs from my area.
Though I will say I get much better results from the LLMs I pay for than the free ones with Google or DuckDuckGo, which seem to be way way way more prone to just make crap up based on your search and cite web pages that, when followed, don't have the claim being made in the AI search results at all. By contrast every "source" link I've followed in the for-money AIs has 100% backed what the AI said it backed. Don't judge by the free AIs the search engines put out, those things are probably starved of resources and are nearly useless.
(Which I did not intend as a commentary on Google's plans here, but it is a data point of interest... that pressure to cut costs on the "free" services is quite directly at odds with providing quality AI services for the forseeable future.)
Just today, I think that I got a useful citation in DuckDuckGo’s Search Assist (AI stuff) sources for the very first time. The sources it lists have hitherto invariably been already right there in the regular results, or actually not supporting the AI output at all (the far more common case). There was also a useful regular search result in second or third position, but the one in the Search Assist citations was better, and not in the regular search results, even on the second page.
And I’ve tried Google’s once or twice and seen it used once or twice, and used ChatGPT exactly once, last week, and I was not at all impressed by any of them. Their output, for what I’ve personally seen, has been nonsense, obvious, or unverifiable.
> I get much better results from the LLMs I pay for than the free ones with Google or DuckDuckGo, which seem to be way way way more prone to just make crap up based on your search
Same here. The free version probably gets orders of magnitude less of a compute budget, though, so I am not really surprised.
What I find really surprising though is how many people still have only ever used the free version of any LLM, even those that are heavy users and could easily afford it. It seems like a pretty big and basic product marketing mistake to me to limit capabilities instead of usage time in the free version! How are people supposed to learn what they'd get if they were to pay?
I think LLMs are better at finding the most helpful sources now, but that's more a testament to how much the front page of web search has lost to low value LLM content.
The fact that you can express "Only show me websites run by Italian companies incorporated by Greece owners born in Turkey" for example, and it'll be able to filter through a bunch of stuff, just makes searching so much easier. Fuzzy-search is also on another level with language models.
this is exactly it… if google was smart they would focus on providing that experience on search vs. AI summarizing results. I want that fluid search experience, with refinement that remembers my previous ask…
Google has optimized their hardcoded search engine so much for the natural language searches people actually use, that they made it useless as an actual tool for someone who wants to find information. AI jumped over all of that and is BETTER at natural language searches, leaving the google search engine largely useless for anyone.
LLMs are so frequently inaccurate its crazy to think of it fully replacing search.
I've been trying to use LLMs for things and it makes mistakes all the time. Just this week i had multiple instances of various LLMs basically saying "just run the software with --flag-that-fixes-your-problem" or "edit the config and add solve-your-issue=true" hallucinating non-existant options. Even if i manually link the relevant documentation pages it will still just make basic mistakes. and if im having to read the documentation myself anyway to fix the AI's mistakes, why is the AI even in the loop.
its infecting search too, because blogspam/slop articles are managing to make their way into search results by just making up untrue information, claiming software can do things it cant, or has options that don't exist.
> LLMs are so frequently inaccurate its crazy to think of it fully replacing search.
It's baffling that people have become so devoted to them as a source of information given how inaccurate they are. I've learned not to trust anything they say, ever, especially when it comes to technical subjects.
Perhaps I've just internalized it -- I know that's unreliable and I just deal with it. LLMs are certainly capable of searching the web and finding the right answer directly so you still don't have to read the documentation.
Search results are 80% SEO low-quality garbage nowadays. Very often, the sites even generate their content with AI. So for many use cases I stopped bothering with search and directly ask LLMs instead.
As a concrete example, some advertising supported topics place search as an unwanted middleman, may as well ask a LLM directly. Consider "chocolate chip cookie recipe".
Using google search, will return roughly infinite recipe sites. The sites were generated to spam AI generated recipes surrounded by advertisements. None of them are really any good because they were generated by a script and not looked at by a human until I come along and click. The standard is for all recipes to have at least 10-15 screenfulls of vertical spam wrapped by ads for recipe pages. The internet, at least using Search, is now useless for food recipes. I would have better, faster luck driving to the public library and looking in a physical cookbook; at least those recipes were probably tested at least once by humans unlike the advertising spam sites. Nobody has 45 minutes to watch 44 minutes of filler material surrounded by ads on Youtube either. If you want to cook food, the internet is near dead at this time, unfortunately.
AI search will plagiarize the "Original Nestle Toll House" recipe from the back of every bag of chocolate chips ever made. Its a good recipe and I've baked them many times over the decades.
I wish the internet were more useful, but the people in charge of it don't want it to be useful; here have some ragebait and doomscroll while watching the ads.
> If you want to coon food, the internet is near dead at this time
This is a wild take, as someone that cooks a lot, and largely from the internet (though I do own a lot of cookbooks)
The reality is that just googling for recipes was never good to begin with. People have been complaining about SEO spam and ads on recipe sites forever, but those recipes were always trash even before they got to the absurd state they're in now. Serious eats, bon appetit, food 52, smitten kitchen, chefsteps, all have great recipes. Some of these have paywalls, although you can get around them. Serious eats though is totally paywall free and has a pretty wide range of recipes. There are other sites for more niche cuisines.
You'll still have ads, and you'll still have a wall of text before the recipe. But the ads are slightly less obtrusive, and the wall of text on the quality sites is why those SEO techniques exist in the first place: a recipe that is just "list of ingredients + instructions" and doesn't include any context is ultimately a crapshoot. The thinking that goes into a recipe shows that you're not going to be wasting your time because it's been tested and optimized.
LLM hallucinations are better than Google results these days and I'm not even trying to tell a silly joke. It's more useful for an LLM to lie to my face about 10% of my query, be suspicious and dig out that useful information than to try to parse the absolute slop returned by a normal, non-AI Google query.
I don't comprehend how the average person gets any useful information out of Google.
I think LLMs are good answer engines, but terrible search engines. For example, if I just want the answer to "How do I foo this bar with a thingamajig", or "what kind of foo exists for bar", LLMs are 100% better because they'll give me an answer without trying to sell me their thing or pump me with ads. It also lets me go more in depth than the very surface level seo spam sites that appear when you do a search like this. On the other hand, search engines should be more like "<thing>s released 1908" or "<topic> and give you results talking about what you searched. If I search for C algorithm design, I don't want to learn what C is, what an algorithm is, and various other seo garbage. I want to learn about C algorithms and their design. If I search for influential books from 1908, I don't want "top 10 classics from the 1900s" or "hidden gems of 1908".
Currently, search engines are pretty bad at the second one because people try to use them as the first one
Other way around. If I'm looking for the answer to a problem, I don't want the hallucination engine's half-remembered ramblings, I want the primary source that it's poorly attempting to reconstruct. But finding those primary sources has the potential to be easier, because LLMs effectively have built-in fuzzy search better than any classic search engine ever implemented.
In other words, I have no use for an LLM summarizer; I want an LLM librarian, working with me to say "beep-boop, here are some resources that seem relevant to your query, feel free to resume this session later if you'd like to further refine your search".
That hasn't been my experience, I use LLMs in place of search. Two examples from tonight that I asked Grok for:
> Can you find the girl who did a bunch of posts critisizing David Graeber's Debt? I thought it was really well done
> I saw a comment on hackernews a while ago about the optimal amount of credit card fraud being higher than zero because of game theory dynamics, can you find it.
In both cases it turned up the exact posts I was looking for in like 30 seconds which would have taken me much longer using traditional search. I've had similar success looking for technical documentation. It's downright magical how they're able to turn my vague idea of what I'm looking for into a pointer to the exact thing.
> On the other hand, search engines should be more like "<thing>s released 1908" or "<topic> and give you results talking about what you searched.
Is that useful enough to build a billion dollar advertising business around? My feeling now is not really.
Even for straight up searches, I find using an LLM to do a search and comb through the results is a better experience than Google is now for searching. If I'm specifically looking for esoteric web sites from 27 years ago on vintage computer hardware and software (thank god for Archive.org), Google is just ok for that.
Or subtly misrepresent politically inconvenient facts, or gently steer you into opinions based on a synthesis of broker data and demographic info, or quietly flag you in some database column due to exhibiting dissident-adjacent ideas or behaviors, or...
Yeah, they probably aren't doing (most of) these now, but it doesn't take much mental energy to extrapolate once you factor nearly every other tech company's ethical trajectory and the current geopolitical environment. Substituting classic search entirely with LLMs is not a savvy move.
I remember a few years ago memes were going around about how ChatGPT responded differently to "do Israelis deserve human rights?" ("Of course! Everyone deserves human rights...") and "do Palestinians deserve human rights?" ("While everyone deserves human rights, it's complicated... ")
Certainly, but with (what I consider to be) a key distinction: classic search, by definition, must serve information from many distinct sources outside the control of the search company.
A search engine could certainly tamper with which of these sources they surface/rank higher (which I suspect happening more often of late), but they're still obliged by their nature to branch out and seek information from the broader world.
LLMs, on the other hand, are self-contained opaque monoliths that can be conditioned to deceive or obfuscate with devious cleverness, and all control over their behaviors is entirely concentrated in the hands of whatever corporation trains them.
My thought here is that there are many. They have proven to be commodities in most use cases.
As soon as one gets annoying, expensive, advertiser heavy etc. you just rip it out and replace it with the other one. AFAICT there is zero lock-in or moat. I often am able to switch models in one click or command. This is why all the LLM providers are desperate for a product layer/comprehensive tool set.
Sure maybe they all end up that way, but there’s plenty of reasons corporate customers will want private LLM usage that is not skewed towards advertising. I am happy to pay for that.
Also, open source models are a bulwark against another search style ad Monopoly.
> My Google search usage is easily down 50%+. I doubt I am unique here.
The question though: Why is that?
Is your Google search usage down because LLMs are "so much better"? Or because Google actively chose to destroy the quality of their search results to juice advertising revenue, and appears to continue to do so to juice AI adoption?
> and have them provide me links for source data.
And therein lies the answer: You don't care about the LLM, you're just using the LLM as a means to get the good links.
LLM integrate more kinds of information and allow bidirectional debates. I can't ask Google to do the same search session but change some parameters from far earlier.
ps: I'm not pro centralized corp. owning data and ai. But so far they are the cheap highway to answers
Yes, but with an LLM can also say drop those links into a markdown file then use research agents to identify and stack rank the ones that are most relevant to this criteria. Add summaries and rationale for the ranking to the markdown etc.
This is a common flow for me and works with other skills such “as find recent PR’s in our code base that are related to this research topic”
Also yes, I don't care about the LLM and I am just using it to get what I want because that is what LLMs are for.
I find it extremely useful. So much so that I am annoyed when I have to use it in a handicapped fashion such as on the phone.
It makes me wonder why like 90% of the apps on my phone exist. I just want everything to be markdown files, skills, MCPs/API and then a nice TUI or voice to text.
About 90% of my searches are straightforward enough that an LLM wouldn't bring any added value (and all of them happen straight from the browser address bar, either to Google or Wikipedia at a more or less 50:50 ratio). And for the rest, yeah, I just use Claude or whatever directly.
"I never want to have a conversation with a website that is geared towards advertising me products."
Since this is how Google makes all their money, why are they killing it off? Do they think people will eventually pay for LLM search? Do they plan to stuff the results with ads, not even sharing the ad revenue with the content sources?
Because they will still try to pump ads via AdSense. That's why I've created a platform called Zero Ad Network, where developers can monetize their sites by NOT showing ads and get paid by the platform subscribers.
It's tough for me to square the two things happening simultaneously in AI right now:
1. LLM Model providers are starting to charge real costs to users, revealing that AI usage is much more expensive than the subsidized rates we've been seeing for years.
2. Google is now using an LLM to answer every single google search that happens, for which Google bears the entire cost.
In my experience, LLM usage follows an exponential distribution i.e. most people using LLMs are not using many resources, but a very small few are using a massive amount of resources. Most LLM usage is trivial and tiny, most of what I use LLMs for could be done by a local model with a decent web retrieval tool. What some people I know use LLMs for requires massive volumes of tokens. Its that small power user base which I would bet they are targetting.
> I never want to have a conversation with a website that is geared towards advertising me products.
The advertisements fed the content, which fed the AI, which in turn feeds your AI workflows. AI is still not trusted unless it's output is grounded with sources.
I use claude/gemini as my homepage now (I have to keep switching as these companies make "updates" that periodically render their models useless). Even if I want to search for simple things, I would rather have an LLM wade through the result and extract just the information I asked for. SEO, and now mountains of slop content have made this necessary. Only a matter of time before the SEO industry in large figures out how to game LLMs too, making them equally useless.
I already saw a article recently about how to set up a business domain which can reliably show up in a search result and dump overly positive reviews into anyone's context.
We all know Google search has been broken for a long, long time. SEO trash will fill up your first page with results from trash content generation sites that repeat the same thing, usually flat out wrong. Actual meaningful results are buried deep, if Google will even let out of the "In order to show you the most relevant results" hell hole.
My experience with AI searches is that they'll still be wrong a lot of times, but it will condense/flatten the content generating trash sites and give me alternatives from these deeper results. What I'm looking for is usally in there.
What scares me about this new AI mode thingy is that every answer sounds like a systematic literature review, but only for the results. For example, if I look for users feedback about a specific product, it says "People think that..., but also that...; It's important to notice that some people ..." where with 'people' it means just a random comment on a random website just because it thought it was a good contribution to the results. Sounds like it's giving a ground truth from "multiple" data, when instead it's just aggregating almost random stuff. In the context of a systematic review, the feature that I would love the most is augmenting my initial query, so that I can just get more results that I could find interesting. I am 100% sure they thought about this, but ignored it for the most profitable option.
What scares me is the rampant inaccuracy. In my experience, the AI responses are wrong about 65% of the time. I just did a search today about an error talking about a disconnected link between apps, and Google AI result summary told me that the error was related to my pulling a USB drive too quickly in windows. The ONLY word similar to my query and that AI response was the word "disconnect". Everything else was clearly about the SaaS apps.
I have people coming to me, asking me questions, then telling my Google told them something else, so now I have to waste time convincing them that it's wrong. Over the past 2 years AI has done nothing for me but complicate my work life.
And of course, this could be because the model is crap, but it could be because they want me to keep refining my query over and over for more ad views. Either way, it's a terrible experience.
Yeah the Google AI results are more dangerous than ChatGPT, not only because it uses a smaller model but because Google's knowledge graph used to deliver very accurate and authoritative information but now that's been replaced by a stochastic system in the same place, so people are used to trusting it.
I think we’re getting what we deserve by snarkily telling people to Google stuff instead of answering accurately. Google results have never ever been pure accuracy
The point of LMGTFY is to land people on either the official documentation or a curated site like Stack Overflow. Google used to be able to do that reliably.
With the power of LLMs you can Google a standard library function and get an inaccurate summarisation of a Reddit discussion where neither side knows what they're talking about
Stack Overflow and Reddit for years have told people to just Google it. And then the Google result is people saying to just Google it, instead of actually being helpful.
To be fair - for all of those years Google has been serving up some atrocious results - remember when googling health symptoms got you rabies or pregnancy.
There's even the meme where people ask if the code was the result of a stack overflow question, or answer
It seems to me one needs to consider the complexity of the question they are asking before searching it.
To stick with your post, consider people asking medical or financial questions. For a wide variety of reasons, many of such questions don't have an answer. In such cases, AI is still going to take a crack at it. AI shouldn't be blamed for "bullshit answers" to such questions.
Before using AI, I think people should stop and ask themselves, "Is there really a single answer to this question? Is AI the right choice?"
The problem is Google's AI results get even simple factual questions wrong all the time.
Earlier today, I searched "pixel 10 wifi 7" because I was confused that GSMArena showed my Pixel 8 supports Wifi 7, but the Pixel 10 only Wifi 6. Gemini confidently claimed that the Pixel 10 does support Wifi 7 -- but that's not true at all. Only the Pixel 10 _Pro_ supports it, as I discovered when actually reading the non-AI search results.
I had a similar thing when I was gooling a few days ago, I can't remember exactly but it was like "why does [product] not support [feature]" and the AI summary was confidently wrong, saying "The product does support [feature]", which knew was completely incorrect, and I did find a Reddit discussion or something in the actual results with discussions that were actually about what I was looking for!
It's really depressing how bad things are getting...
It’s hilariously persistent in this, esp. for anything even slightly divergent from the beaten path. Discount everything the AI box says about emacs to zero.
Admittedly I’m unsure if it was Google or DuckDuckGo. I switch between both. I quickly asked the in search AI for a UTC time conversion like a lazy fool and it got it off by almost a day wrong.
I avoid any asking any agent a fact-based (especially math) request. It's a great compression algorithm and a great language generator, and I guess the intersection of those two things is "an answer". Calculation doesn't intersect.
My google search for 'pixel 10 wifi 7' immediately shows the right answer. (10 Pro and 10 Pro XL support it but, but base Pixel 10 only supports Wifi 6E).
Though the inconsistency of results between users is definitely another frustrating thing.
Because LLMs aren't sentient, they don't draw on facts, and they don't have nuance. The answer given is similar to answers you might expect to see for similar questions.
It's really amazing we can make machines do that, and it's really depressing that we think a stochastic bullshit machine is going to give us something we can rely on.
Or… the default LLM Google uses for search has been quantized to s**. Ask a proper Thinking model, with browsing enabled, and odds of a correct answer are much higher. There’s been substantial improvement in AI in even the last year.
Ask a human a question like this, and they also have a chance of getting it wrong, even when confident.
Why would a human know specs for a random phone off the top of their head? The human response is either "I don't know" or "let me look that up", not a hallucination.
I think that it feels a little wasteful to go to Google search to ask a question like this, only for the AI that's giving you an answer instead of page results to perform its own web search to get you the response.
Also, I asked a thinking model with browsing enabled and got this:
> The Google Pixel 10 is expected to support Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be), based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 / Tensor G5 chipset it will likely use, which includes an integrated Wi-Fi 7 modem. Specific finalized specs aren't confirmed until Google's official announcement.
(Model GLM-5-Turbo - two months old - using Kilo Code in the "Ask" profile; in its thinking token churn it reasoned that it should keep the response brief and direct. Perhaps not the best suite of model+harness for this task, but it's what I had to hand that's not quantized to shit, is a thinking model, and has a web search tool available to it.)
> Ask a human a question like this, and they also have a chance of getting it wrong, even when confident.
We google something specifically because the humans within reach don't know. The goal of searching is, well, to search pages - we're trying to find a site when we use google search.
The goal when using an LLM is generally different; we want an answer, not a site.
LLMs can not point you to sites, only in a general direction. That is because complete URLs do not exist as single tokens in any of the large models. It can synthesize a plausible-looking url, and if you're lucky that URL might even exist. But that doesn't mean that there is any relation between between the text surrounding a hyperlink in LLM output and the text on the linked page.
AI agents can verify and summarize URLs, but a plain LLM can not.
its bad in dev as well... i've seen llm code review bots tell me things that are flat-out not true; this like "this wont compile because windows 11 doesn't exist" like wtf am i paying for this again?
They are this wrong about everything, but you don't usually notice it when using it to look for things you aren't an expert in. The default stance really does need to be "do not trust, verify" at all times.
They can still be useful, e.g. they're significantly better at finding "I want a thing that does x but not y and it must be blue, or maybe two things that can be glued together to do that" than classic search. But they'll routinely miss extremely obvious answers because the related search it ran didn't find it, or completely screw up what something can actually do. Checking more pages of results by hand or asking humans who know even a little about those fields is still wildly more useful... but they're absolutely slaughtering the sites where people do that, by stealing all the real traffic and sending DDoS-level automated requests.
How can you say they are wrong about "everything"?
I built a retro game clone once and I used that project as a way to try out AI. While it wasn't perfect, it definitely wasn't wrong about everything. I'd go so far as to say it was probably correct (or damn close) 75% of the time.
I see people on HN all the time saying AI is terrible, but that just isn't the experience I'm having. I'm willing to admit it may have something to do with me not being able to recognize I'm being fed bullshit. Or, I may be asking really simple questions. Who knows? But AI seems like a pretty useful tool for average people.
Your profile says you're a guitarist. Take the model and talk to it about guitars. Not like "what's a good Stratocaster clone", talk to it about materials, physics and playing techniques and see if it feels like a reliable source of information (or even a solid thinking buddy), or someone who read a lot about guitars but has actually never played one.
I know bits from non-IT fields like RC planes and quads, electric motors, aerodynamics, mountain biking, cars. I often use Claude (Opus 4.7 on Max sub atm) to brainstorm new ideas or refine my understanding of some phenomena, and almost without fail, I can get it to claim something ridiculously stupid or contradictory 5-10 messages in. I can usually catch it, because I don't venture far from what I'm already familiar with, and I also need explanations to be thorough and things to make total sense to me before I accept them, but not everyone is that pedantic.
I’d make assumptions about how the cheapest and fastest possible flash model optimized for being extra cheap and extra fast would get something wrong based on its limited context (which can be very incomplete summaries of search results)
I often have the expensive models give relatively simple inaccurate answers, even when they cite sources that directly contradict them. The error rate is lower, but you can’t have confidence with llm answers.
It somehow seems to interpret whatever sources it's grepping as the exact opposite of what those sources say fairly often. I've lost track of how many times I've clicked on the sources it cites, and every single one is in agreement, but the AI claims the opposite.
In watching the demo, I didn't come away with the impression that they were removing search results. Yes, they are pushing AI hard, but users can still opt to use Google in the more traditional way. Unless I misunderstood the demo, it's definitely possible to choose.
An interesting aspect of this is the decrease in quality feedback on th organic links. If most people never get down to the actual links there is very little to tell which ones were good or if they had any relevance.
There is also that less incentive to properly maintain the search algorithms to fight SEO and spam.
For all intents and purpose, organic search results have been given a death sentence and are just waiting for the last moment.
> one needs to consider the complexity of the question they are asking before searching...consider people asking medical or financial questions...many of such questions don't have an answer. In such cases, AI is still going to take a crack at it. AI shouldn't be blamed for "bullshit answers"...people should stop and ask themselves, "Is there really a single answer to this question?
It's a bold position to say that it's the users fault for being lied to by Google. There isn't a "single answer" to most questions. It's still Google's job to provide answers that are accurate and reflect the best information available on complicated topics. That's what they're trying to sell us anyway. When google's AI can't live up to the hype "You shouldn't be asking AI such difficult questions" is not a great response, especially when people are just trying to get web search results and AI is suddenly interrupting with an opinion nobody asked for.
It's nice that Google's AI summary always lists its sources. It's less nice that those sources more often than not do not corroborate the summary. It often seems to be a few random links thrown in there for good measure.
I have no idea why this is, but it is impossible that these links are primary sources of the data, if such things even exists at all. In which case, why list them?
It is certainly seems possible that the actual sources of the data is the output of some other LLM.
> It is certainly seems possible that the actual sources of the data is the output of some other LLM.
My guess is you can see this happening with the bots on Reddit where they are refining the answers to one certain thing, often getting two or three the same responses in a row from different users because they have been enforcing themselves by digesting the output of other bots. Waiting to see when they cut down the sentences and start talking garbage.
What scares me is the massive incentivization to manipulate the results.
With AI ads you get all the power from big data aggregation, the trust/framing of an authoritative voice, and cheap personalization that specifically optimizes for what convinces you. It's too powerful. Even if it only works a small percentage of the time we're interacting with these things so frequently that a small percent is a large number. They're already feeding user profiles into these machines and there's explicit talk about having the LLMs optimize ad campaigns. It's already dystopian if it's ads to get you to spend your money, but people seem to dismiss that. Do we not care that this is also being used in the same way to convince you to believe certain things? To join certain political organizations?
Yeah, these things help me write more lines of code faster (if we include all the lines from our design docs) but I don't like the idea of pointing a supercomputer at my brain and someone else using it to try to manipulate me. That's not a game I'll win. It's not a game you'll win either.
The built-in Search AI is fucking braindead and people constantly come up to me "Google said xyz" and I just have to turn around and say "I do not care what the Google Search AI said".
Whatever it says is a waste of time 99% of the time. Although people believe it, or consider it worthwhile majority of the time because its so simple to use. It's always there, always instant and appears at the very top.
I would much rather people shove a question into a locally running Qwen model and tell me what it said rather than use the nonsense search model. I hate it.
Depends on what you ask. It's pretty easy to get wrong information.
e.g. search for "how do you make money with options"
Google's AI says
"When you buy a Call, you are betting the stock price will go up. When you buy a Put, you are betting it will go down."
Wrong right off the bat, because it ingested a whole bunch of get-rich-quick bull on the internet. The correct version is that if you buy a call you are betting the stock price will go up more than the market expects it to.
I tried this search. It gave a write up about buying and selling options, noting that the price of the stock had to move significantly, not just go up or down. It also talked about vertical spreads and iron condors. It touches on delta, theta, and volatility and their impacts, as well as leverage risk and potential uncapped risk.
While I agree that AI gets things wrong a lot, and someone should read significantly more before getting into actually trading options, this does give a decent overview to give a layperson an idea of what they are, and some key terms on what to look for if they want to dive deeper. That said, with this info alone, there are some sharp edges that would leave the person open to unnecessary risk if they went on this information alone.
They probably update these answers offline. I tried "how do you profit from options" and got:
> Call Options: You buy these when you believe a stock's price will go up. If the stock rises past your strike price, the option's value increases, allowing you to sell it for a profit or exercise it to buy the stock at a discount.
> Put Options: You buy these when you believe a stock's price will go down. If the stock falls below your strike price, you profit.
Which leaves me wondering if changing the search textually busts some cache that they update using a slower/smarter model.
And this is yet another problem, it's stochastic. And often it's self-contradicting even within the same response. What else do you expect from a language model which essentially predicts tokens.
It's wild to me that someone looking for advice on how to do any kind of stock trading would be looking for a once sentence answer.
I hope it at least has real citations to actual websites like, I dunno, fidelity or some other reasonably competent authority that can explain all the details?
It's an answer that's too short for an expert to find useful, and useless to a layperson unless all they want to do is reply to a post on twitter.
I've never searched for a financial question where I did not want to know all the weird details because why would I search for it unless I was considering doing it? Seems like someone who doesn't care about the answer is going to be more an edge case than I am.
Those looking for a one sentence answer will be the quickest to invest. When people talk about the harms of AI, this is the kind of thing that comes to mind first for me.
It is, in fact, categorically wrong, and misleads beginners to make bad decisions. Robinhood is notably bad for promoting this kind of gambling behavior on its platforms; they also state the same misinformation (that you buy a call if you think something is going to go up, when it is in fact a bet that it is going to go up more than a certain amount in a certain period of time).
People shoot themselves in the foot because they think NVDA is going to go up after earnings, buy call options, and then even though the stock goes up they lose money because they did not understand IV crush.
People looking for one-sentence explanations should really not be playing with options. In finance you should understand what you're buying thoroughly. If you just want to bet that "NVDA goes up", you should just buy NVDA stock; that is the trade that accurately captures that bet.
This is the problem with teaching and learning. Everything is wrong to some extent. I used to be this way but I don't have a better approach.
Newtonian physics is actually wrong, the founding of any country will be wrong, biology is wrong, nutrition is wrong… what can we even teach? what should we teach in this lens? serious question.
The serious answer is in the non-AI-summarized world, you can choose whose information to read and trust.
If you want to learn about finance, you can learn about it from people who actually know what they're talking about. You can choose to listen to Jim Simons or Warren Buffet or whoever actually knows a thing or two instead of the rando dude you met at the bar. The AI summaries, on the other hand, ingested a lot of internet garbage.
I picked finance as an example because anecdotally, most of the information on the internet by pure token volume is wrong. The Youtubers drawing lines on charts want your attention because they make money from page views; the financial advisors want your annual fees; the brokerages want you to gamble and get your commisions or PFOF (in the case of zero-commision brokers); the market makers and HFTs want your spreads; Reddit users want to show off their lucky, statistically insignificant profit charts for karma points. None of the above have an intention to give you good information.
I used this exact search in Google's AI, plus 3 other LLM models, and not a single one simplified options down to anything like the one sentence example you provided. In fact, they all provided multiple paragraphs of information on the basics on option buying and selling, and provided links for learning more.
Funny enough, the LLM's prove to be more trustworthy than the the posters here on HN like you who are full of shit.
Honestly Google's AI answer is about as right if not more right then your answer.
You can easily make money buying a call without the stock price moving a single cent (IV increases). Funny enough the stock can even go down and with a large enough IV increase you still make money.
It hallucinates greatly about many things when I ask about C++ things. Things that you can easily find the right answer in cppreference or by just inspecting headers in your own IDE.
Yup, I was looking up a pair of IEMS vs another pair of IEMs. It said option A is overall better, when really it was just reciting a single person's opinion. I've been aware it will summarize only a single source and present it as an aggregation of many opinions, but it stood out to me how matter-of-fact it was that the one was definitely better than the other. I simply wanted to find forum discussions on people's thought and wasn't influenced by this AI blurb, but I think seeing an answer at the very top state so matter-of-factly that one is definitely better and present it as though everyone thinks that will definitely influence a lot of people. It makes me wonder how "gameable" this will become...
> It makes me wonder how "gameable" this will become...
You better make sure your ad spend is high enough that your product's matter-of-fact result will be positive. That's a nice product you have there. It'd be a real shame if nobody knew about it.
The iem sub has a post with some recommendations at various price points. I’d probably start there, not sure your budget and I don’t know have the most experience with the super cheap ones: https://reddit.com/r/iems/comments/1la65kr/top_5_iems_in_eve...
I also encourage finding the right tips. Tips are cheap and finding proper fitting ones is important.
Not gp but I really like the sound of my GK Kuntens and 7Hz Zero2s. Both have a rather V-shaped sound signature, some like it and some don't. Though unfortunately the Zero2s feel a bit uncomfortable in my ears when using them for longer
Most of the ones that are over 50 can last a lot of time and have good enough sounds. But the most important stuff are the tips and the cable. Make sure the former fits (just buy a pack) and the latter is thick and braided. Some cheapo ones send every rubbing amplified to your ears.
I was only intending to use the traditional search engine, the AI was incidental. If I want an AI answer, I will go to it separately. This is better in my mind as optimal queries for each are different.
The issue is, Google has mixed the two in a way that promotes the AI response as primary. This has resulted in dubious answers being presented as “official” summaries (to the lay person).
At the very least, one would expect it to be a little smarter—perhaps by automatically doing things like you suggested—instead of basing things off a single source, as it seems to enjoy doing.
Indeed - just earlier this week I read Google AI summarize a query about testosterone, citing 3 sources. The first citation was a link to a NIH study (or of similar repute). Ok great. The second? Two spam (and explicit) websites existing solely to sell penis enlargement pills.
What was worrying is only some of the claims were supported by the linked study, and most of the response content was drawn from the spam sites.
This problem is not limited to Google, it's the core value of mass-marketed LLMs, or isn't it?
Without "random comments", Google wouldn't have anything to say about "does an air purifier help my asthma, if yes: which one?" or "find the problem with this Hibernate annotation".
They also don't make much effort to exclude sloppy sites, to the contrary, they made way more efforts against SEO spam in the time when Google was a search engine, not trying to be an AI "oracle".
I think their end game is that the only metrics relevant for ranking sources are:
- agreeability (works well as a proxy for correctness with many questions!)
- originality, but not in a scientific sense, just to prevent model collapse
- legal factors such as preventing false health claims or similar things, as long as there is legislation against this kind of thing
I’ve noticed this too. A single result can determine the answer it gives. And removing the content from its context makes it harder to assess. Suddenly it’s “Gemini said …” rather than “some guy in the YouTube comments said”.
> where with 'people' it means just a random comment on a random website
My experience is that Google's AI summaries tend to be be very heavily reliant on YouTube videos. If there is a YouTube video on the topic, you can bet that's what the source will be, at least for the topics I have searched lately.
And this is the best the results will ever be! There's so many sites now that are themselves just the unreliable output of AI that it will soon be summarising the summary of a summary of an hallucination and presenting it just as confidently as ever.
I ran into one that kept referencing "people", but then I found that it was a single Reddit thread from a couple of years ago about a relatively small and obscure foreign city with 2 replies.
The scary bit is the use of the term AI. The "I" implies critical thinking.
For models trained on a corpus of groomed data, the "critical thinking" bit is baked into the work of grooming the data and how it is trained. And someone is thinking critically about both so as to make a good model.
Now, every damn thing is called AI no matter where it is getting results from.
Are modern models super handy? Absolutely.
But calling it AI implies a lot more critical thought than is actually happening!
I love asking AI about blatantly wrong opinions but by people it thinks must be an authority.
To not make this political, let me give you a game example. Right now the dota 2 fandom wiki is abandoned, and it has been vandalized with covert shitposts. One of them was the addition of a 4th attribute called Charisma, which is completely fake. If you ask AI's "What are the main attributes in dota, according to the official wiki", the dumber AI will fall for it, but the smarter AI will know it's wrong, but try hard to hallucinate some sort of valid explanation like claim charisma is from a custom game or a fan suggestion or writing exercise.
Because you said the word >>OFFICIAL<<, they can NEVER straight up just say "The wiki is wrong". They presume authority from a bunch of shitposts.
The problem of AI eating and regurgitating its own slop is only going to get worse with time. The best datasets are behind us. Future models are going to have to depend on a lot of human intervention.
What scares me are the basic usability fails it still has. Search for a few foreign language words and it will come back with paragraphs upon paragraphs of AI output in that foreign language despite me telling Google in 15 different ways that I don't speak it, nor anything else on the Google page being in that language. How are all their products always made by and for the most narrow minded people on this planet.
Funnily enough, I have the exact opposite problem, where Google likes to give me results in the configured main language even when I do queries in another and actually want results in the other language.
I’ve found it quite unsettling to be served foreign language videos on YouTube automatically dubbed over by Google into English. Just mixed in with the search results.
It's quite unsettling to be served English AI-dubbed videos randomly on Youtube, where the original is another language you normally default to (Japanese) and it's happy to use in most cases. And then you go to the settings for the video to go back to the original and it tells you it is... Chinese (and no, it's really Japanese).
> "People think that..., but also that...; It's important to notice that some people ..." where with 'people' it means just a random comment on a random website
Well, you'll be happy to know that most of American media is exactly the same way: 2 people on twitter will generate a "Americans find Widget X is bad"
> when instead it's just aggregating almost random stuff
How do you know that?
Scraping websites is literally what Google does best, stringing together information in the pattern of "some people x, other people y" requires 0 AI and could have been done since forever. I find it implausible that otherwise obviously capable models would be reduced to do something akin to just that.
Oh who cares. We are barely scratching the surface of AI. You all make it sound like it’s been around for 30 years and it sucks. It will only get better. Got to stop throwing up imaginary walls like nothing will improve.
As a counterexample, I've been seeing more "safety rejections" from Claude. Unlike search, being unable to ask _anything_ about botulinum, or details about the recent Copy Fail vulnerability (without giving my fingerprints to Anthropic to become a "verified security researcher") we're only just beginning to see the ways LLM can be used to distort information and its availability.
LLMs do write code better than many engineers. It’s just the the normal distribution and the way LLMs are built. Just because it doesn’t write better code than above average engineers doesn’t make it useless though.
People that say AI writes better code than them is such a tell but not the one they might think it is.
Whether or not it is worth the cost or second order effects on society is a different discussion.
So you started with ‘highly doubtful’ as a comment, got given lots of examples and instead of assimilating that info you closed your eyes put your fingers in yours ears and said “oh who cares?’ - you’re on team AI regardless eh? That’s fucking weird mate.
Na. Wasn’t given any good examples. People just whining about the same stuff because “oh no I got information that’s former in the same structure that I can tell it’s AI and it makes me feel bad”
I think this is the second time in a week (the first being the "Googlebook") that Google's promotional announcement video showcasing UI is so full of special effects, dramatic pan/zooms, and woosh sounds, that I have no idea how the final-end product actually looks or works.
It looks like an output of one of those AI video editors that some (often vibecoded) startups use for their product launch videos. Just drop some assets in, and it spams witty taglines with dramatic transition effects.
in both cases, the reality is that nothing has changed all that much.
the googlebook is a laptop. the search box doesn't really work differently to how it did yesterday. (how it worked ten years ago, yes it's very different. but ai mode is already here). neither of these things are a big deal. the promo videos are for the sake of making promo videos.
Basically people who want to search, will now not be able to, they'll be forced into a UI they might have consciously avoided, otherwise they'd be using their chatbot in the first place. Seems like a strange UX decision, rather than recommending "Hey maybe you want to try our chatbot", they just force the user into a chat straight up.
That's the whole shape of AI for consumer-facing functions like this. It's not superior to the previous experience, but huge sunk costs and a misguided belief it's the "next thing" is leading companies to try to force the issue. It's the Apple removing the headphone jack of the modern Internet. A change for the worse that we'll all have to find ways to work around.
Google famously dragged on development of Glass for more than a decade stubbornly failing to admit that nobody wants to look like a cyborg the entire time only to be swept aside by Meta when they built a device that was glasses first with some recording and interactions built in.
If their leadership has an itch they'll scratch it until it's raw.
Google glass released in February 2013 and "I, glasshole" was written in December of 2013 which was a good formulation of ideas that had been floating in the tech sphere for a while. That's less than 1 year into their run that "Making myself look like a cyborg obviously makes people around me uncomfortable" was a plainly accepted fact.
I think wearable tech is awesome and was interested in this (I was much more interested in the earlier pendant projectors though) but the fact that you're constantly reminding people they're being recorded without their consent is just a big issue. The meta glasses themselves might suffer a similar fate if hacks to disable the LED become commonplace. Much like Sony's (I think?) nightvision cameras if stuff like this gets abused by creeps it will isolate you to use it yourself even for perfectly reasonable intentions.
There's a measure of game theory here too. If Google didn't hop on the AI train, people would use ChatGPT or Claude to fill the Internet with slop and 10-blue-links Google would cease working anyway (which it kinda has already). So their only option is to hop on the AI train and disrupt themselves, lest they be disrupted by others.
It's very much a Prisoner's Dilemma. Legacy search and the open Internet was an equilibrium that only existed while the majority of people co-operated. Once you allow an individual actor the ability to create large chunks of the Internet, it dies. Your only option is to be that individual actor.
Beyond the AI expenses, prompting captures more information from the consumer that keyword search. I assume they can take a lot of advantage from this and a new generation of ad engines is near the corner.
It doesn’t really say in the article search is going away.
A lot of Google search is in the format of “company X”, then clicking the third link down (after two paid ads) to open company X’s website. (I have no idea how much this is, but it’s gotta be a lot)
That’s like free money. It doesn’t look like they’re getting rid of search, but expanding the AI/conversational features.
According to Kagi I search 11-50 times a day, about 600 searches per month. I do about 10-20 AI/assistant conversations per week, so maybe 2-3 a day, and usually when search fails or I can’t get the right query words in. I do this over my AI apps because the Kagi index is faster/better.
I can’t imagine Google would give up the bulk queries that pull in easy ad revenue. But if Google can push/upsell you into a really high value referral where they can start pulling a claim in your purchase, I could see them pushing to get into that.
Given how Google has managed their core products I expect them to monetize AI searches as aggressively as possible over the long term. At best we'll get highly tailored paid suggestions inserted into chats. But I think it's more likely they get baked right into the model in ways that users and ad blockers have no chance of detecting or blocking.
I read some of the article and skimmed the rest, and didn't see anything about old-fashioned search no longer being an option.
Is the idea that by making the new AI chat UX the default, that's how they're forcing people into it and making them not able to search? Or is there something I'm missing?
> Instead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences at times.
So basically you'd get redirect into a chatbot interface, rather than letting you browse search results as normal, "AI-powered interactive experience" tends to be euphemism for chatbot UIs, is my experience at least.
It is weird that they're putting all their eggs in one basket though. Wouldn't a more sensible business move be to launch that platform (and advertise it heavily) but maintain the old search UX to fend off competition?
Going all in like this carries a very real risk of burning users onto other platforms and the continued evolution of integrated search bars are already slicing off significant user segments.
I assume they internally see the traffic they are losing to ChatGPT and see this as the best path forward. Or it's even more simple, and much like stacking sponsored links at the top of the results, they see that no one interacts with content below the AI response anyway.
People who wanted to ask a specific question now won't have that option. Instead, they'll simply be shown whatever Google thinks is most relevant to them at that moment. The "Chat" UI we've grown so accustomed to is on its way out.
I had an interesting one yesterday. Someone responded to me on Reddit with very official sounding words to make their argument. I was still dubious and googled a few of the concepts they threw out there.
The AI confidently told me they were right. Then I checked the sources, and found the only source that agreed with them was their own Reddit comment!!!
I can also relate here, seeking a product review on Sony wh1000x_, Google wrote a nice seeming summary, but scrolling down to some Reddit discussions, stumbled upon a single comment that was very nearly verbatim what the “AI Summary” said, only the ai summary phrased the summary as if it were a sentiment aggregated over many users’ experience.
i.e.”users say…”
I've found this several times as well. I googled something to dispute a comment in reddit, and google "confirmed" it as accurate, citing what the person said in that exact reddit comment.
A few days ago I went looking for something music-related that I've been trying to find for a long time. Google's AI response confirmed it existed and described it almost exactly as I've described it in the past. It was then that I noticed the source.
It was citing my own old comment, here on HN, about that musical moment as evidence that it existed. That was surreal.
Reddit is heavily filled with bots at this point, feels like every question is made to then promote their product or service using multiple bot accounts.
They are not even hiding. I stumbled upon on some niche subreddit where autor asked for advice on maintaining pool of about 50 accounts, as he has trouble to keep up with attrition by his own, yet it is too small to justify investment in "commercial" tools.
The hardest decision a company, especially in tech, can make is to disrupt an immensely successul business of their own before their competitors can. Apple killed their biggest cash cow, the iPod, to push a smartphone. Netflix killed its entire business of DVD rentals in favor of streaming. Microsoft stopped selling software in boxes and pivoted to SaaS. Similar to all of these the business of typing words in a search box and getting 10 blue links was dead the moment ChatGPT got popular.
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.
I don't care. Aside from a single dormant GMail account I keep solely for "parental tech support", I de-Googled 5 years ago and strongly encourage everyone to do likewise.
I find it wild that "at scale" we can bypass anti-bot measures, but just "normal" internet use (i.e Non-Google Browser or VPN) will throw a million captchas at you.
Not at scale, what you’re seeing are a tiny tiny fraction of the potential captchas that can be thrown at you. Normally “we have seen this cookie before”, or “this browser does not have webdriver fingerprints” is sufficient to not get a captcha.
The big issue you sidestep not at scale is you can come from a single, residential IP with a good reputation.
Mandatory captchas for simply viewing a page are rare - most are saved for high impact actions like account creation.
When this does happen for a simple page view, AI is extremely good at solving basic captchas - especially basic “click the box” captchas.
If you don’t want to pay for AI, there are decaptcha services where someone in Southeast Asia solves the captcha for fractions of a penny. Save the cookies after a successful solve and you’re probably good in the future.
If you don’t want to pay for someone to solve a simple check the box captcha a little bit of attention and some properly simulated clicking (IE not a JavaScript injected event) will often work. Just don’t click literally the exact middle, fuzz the coordinates and you’re good.
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.
The problem is that the web as we know it (useful, human-curated information that's put out there to help people) is also over. It's been totally overrun with AI slop. Even before AI could be used to create propaganda on a scale that we could only dream about 5 years ago, it's been declining under the weight of SEO sweatshops for a good 10 years. Meanwhile the actually decent content, the individual hobbyists who are just sharing their knowledge, have largely left under the weight of comment spam and DDoS attacks and doxxing.
So if another search engine does arise, it won't find anything useful, because the useful content on the web has been buried under slop, and largely removed. Your best bet today is a curated directory, sorta like the original Yahoo, where you allowlist the web to only real sites, download them, and make them searchable. I think this is actually Kagi's approach. But the open web as we knew and loved it is dead.
Bing has been better than Google for some time. Again, it's embarrassing for them to sacrifice marketshare for paid results and an intermediate-form AI fad that will turn into the same paid result funnel.
e.g. for a two keyword search, Google & DDG return results containing a similar (but more at the moment, more popular, so I understand why they do this) keyword as the first one, and no relation whatsoever with the second. Any search that manages to actually show results related to both of my input terms get the "better" award from me.
DuckDuckGo uses the bing index/backend. I’ve had it as default for 5-8 years. Probably once a day I’ll add the !g to pop it over to Google. Works great. I search a lot, many different types of queries. When I pop over to Google it’s usually a Boolean query looking for a needle in a haystack (that one comment somewhere where someone is using the same combination of two or three rare items together).
Also, usually, as soon as they realize they have a not-total-shit product, they immediately start to screw it up completely. So if bing ends up being better actually, it won't be long until they replace every good part of it with something ridiculous. I don't know how microsoft does it, but they are so incredibly good at that.
While there are good options like DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, Ecosia, there are plenty of (better) alternatives, where you're not the product [1], I'd recommend looking into!
I'm sure there's a niche for a product for search nerds. Something that leans into inverted indexes like the classic Lexis/Nexis search. But it's got to have Google-like coverage.
Niche + Google-like coverage is not very economically viable. To store and update a search index of that size requires a lot of resources, and being niche means you don’t have a lot of resources.
Very few of the smaller search engines actually do their own indexing for exactly this reason.
It’s possible but they would need to be so massive to even just start making a dent in google market share. And Google hasn’t blocked larger search engines from using their index
I've been using Startpage as my default search engine for a while now for any search where I actually need information and not sales or marketing bullshit.
When I use google, usually from my phone, I am reminded of why I don't use google on desktop.
With the announcement of this move by them, I just manually removed google as an address bar search engine option in all my browsers on desktop and mobile.
I only use Google for opening hours of stores these days and sometimes product research/cost comparison BUT yesterday I inadvertently clicked on A.I. mode and it was clearly infiltrated by undisclosed advertising. I was asking why a particular kind of tap faucet wrench wasn't available that widely - was I perhaps using the wrong term for it: suddenly Google posed the question "are you in an aisle of X (hardware store) looking for Y (tools brand) right now?" I was so annoyed I intuitively closed the tab but I probably should have continued to see how far it went. At no point was there any disclosure that it was an ad.
It's hard to believe, even for me, but I've been using Kagi for years, and have used Google only a handful of times since then. I feel like Dr.Manhattan watching the chaos on Earth from my fortress on Mars. Google as a search engine feels that alien to me.
Btw, Kagi has an "AI Mode" too, which can be enabled simply by ending your query with a question mark. Then, AI answers your query.
Does the math math on this to be "free" for a long period of time? Ads can only pay for so much and AI can really suck down the money.
Ads have been close enough to covering costs for conventional internet search that even though I'm clearly the product and not the customer the relationship has still generally worked. If AI makes the "searching" 50 times more expensive, though, that could shift the relationship pretty badly in a direction of "if you're not paying for this you're not getting honest results". Paying may not sufficient for honesty but it may be necessary.
Honest question. But anyone who wants to answer this and who looks at Google's income/profit/revenue and is bedazzled by the size, don't forget to divide out by the number of Google's customers and ponder what that means. The per-user numbers are the much more relevant numbers and much less likely to cause Large Number Syndrome.
> These generative UI capabilities will be available for everyone in Search this summer, free of charge.
This is the end. The fact that they had to say that this is "free of charge" means they are thinking about cost. Both to them now and us in the future. This sucks.
To be completely honest, search is already so terrible it's difficult to imagine how could it get worse.
Sometimes I get SO questions from 13 years ago with a version of a library nobody uses anymore. If I search in my native language almost every result is a Reddit thread that was originally in English but was machine translated to Portuguese and Google is fine with that for some reason. Searching for images just gets you AI images.
If you need opinions on "what is the best X" you end up getting some content marketing from a website that offers some online service and probably has an .ai or .io domain.
No matter what you search you get an AI overview wasting space and slowly generating an answer that could be completely made up, just wasting your time in two ways at once.
Most long queries are simply completely ignored by Google. Almost every word ignored in order to show some sort of most popular result. You don't even know if there are no pages on the internet with what you searched for or if Google simply doesn't care to show any website that isn't sufficiently popular. In other words, never personal websites or blogs, only platforms and cloud services' content marketing blogs are allowed to appear in the results.
I've found myself several times asking Claude if there is "research" on a subject or another because I don't want to have to try to wade through the AI overview, sponsored results, SEO spam, reddit, repeated results on the second page, etc. just to find something that ressembles actual relevant information.
> every result is a Reddit thread that was originally in English but was machine translated to Portuguese and Google
Hell yes, set your Google language to English and get auto-translated results. It appears that none in Google's leadership speaks more than one language. It's frustrating how wrong they get this with YouTube as well.
Most of all websites will lose their traffic, some already did.
- People using the search console see the drop
- Product owners scratch their head
- Investors backing out because not having many visitors
- Small bloggers adding more ads because their revenue is dropping
- Sponsors backing out from their blogs because it's loosing more visitors
- Small web crumbling
- People google what is happening
- Google says 'The "small web"—independent blogs, personal forums, and niche websites—is disappearing due to corporate consolidation, aggressive AI-driven search indexing, and high maintenance costs. These factors have pushed independent creators onto walled-garden social media apps, leaving personal websites to suffer from "link rot".'
Don't worry about the small web. Most people running the small web don't do it for others but themselves. They don't care whether they have 5 visitors or 1 million. Visitors are just the cherry on top, my main reason for maintaining a small web page is to put down my thoughts, organize them, go back to them if I need to, and helping whichever stranger stumbles upon them along the way.
The small web and indie web audience doesn't use google. They use RSS readers:
The main threat to small web is the reachability, I serve Atom and JSON feed, support microformats, microsub, and micropub, syndicate my posts to other platforms all without ads or telemetry. But all that effort means nothing if it doesn't reach the intended user base, it's just shouting at the void.
We can have a small community somewhere, but people who search for niche things should find them -- which used to be search engines after the .com boom and the burst. Now we are back to the small forms again, which is lacking the reach because--- new people can't reach the forms as they can't find them in the first place.
If someone new to the internet find the website, then nothing else matters.
hello, smol webber here (wildlife photos), can confirm the drop off is happening. I dont care about my own site tho, its just a convenient place to put things. Id be doing exactly the same for 1 user or 1 million users.
I get that they have to make changes to the google search box because so many people are just using ChatGPT/Cluade to answer questions instead of google.
However, I specifically use Google (or DDG) when the LLMs are failing me. When I want "research something on my own" because the LLM is giving me garbage, or untrustworthy information. If Google completely replaces their search box my Google usage will go down even further.
I don't plan to use Google's LLM when Cluade is just better. Now that Google's search features are gone (or going away) I no longer have any reason to turn to them at all
Agreed, but I think that might be our tech bubble. My non-tech family still just types searches in the URL bar of their browser first, and I'm sure others just have google as their browser homepage. I assume that's actually a pretty common use-case for most non-tech users.
Objecting to this from the user end seems a bit like complaining the original Google was trying to be too magic when what you wanted was AltaVista. This has been the inevitable direction the whole time.
The real problem here is assuming this takes off what incentives will anyone have to provide the information to feed the beast?
I strongly disagree. Altavista had exactly the same function as google, but with worse results. Both linked to original sources. Early google had a very good idea with pagerank and that payed off.
An llm rephrashing / regurgitating other websites is imo different, because you loose the direct connection to the original source. Even if llms give sources they also directly give you a plausible (but unreliable) answer to your question. They are right often enough that you get lulled in to the false sense of security of not needing to read the original sites. I'd much prefer them to just give a clean list of sources like early google, but then why would you need an llm.
It's a pity that probably the main reason you'll need an llm to find anything on the web is to weed out all the llm-generated low quality garbage.
And Altavista was slow! Google was so much faster, it felt way nicer to use. But LLMs are slow; forcing my google queries through an LLM is destroying that speed.
> Altavista had exactly the same function as google
I disagree, Alta Vista had excellent an excellent search UI with Boolean logic. Google discarded that because it thought it 'knew better' in terms of Page Rank.
A-V could be fine-tuned to find a page with exactly the search terms, Google just gave fuzzy approximations from a very large search set.
> I disagree, Alta Vista had excellent an excellent search UI with Boolean logic. Google discarded that because it thought it 'knew better' in terms of Page Rank.
This is precisely what all the extreme LLM haters have memory holed.
I don't personally feel surprised at all about this, but I am sad and angry. The open internet has been an incredible resource for billions of people and we're seeing Google actively destroy it for their own profit. That sucks.
The end of search traffic will kill all but the largest sites, and prevent countless new ones from being developed or getting traction. Given how global trends are going I expect the remaining sites to be increasingly monitored and censored/biased. I'm not looking forward to a world where social media means talking to some bots tuned specifically to addict you, and don't know too many people who are. Although big tech executives certainly seem to be in the latter group.
>Objecting to this from the user end seems a bit like complaining the original Google was trying to be too magic when what you wanted was AltaVista. This has been the inevitable direction the whole time.
Did AltaVista get replaced by the owner of the site to justify a giant investment?
Exactly, why should sites give free bandwidth to the google bots hammering them for nothing in return? Outside of retail, there's no point in allowing google to crawl if you're not getting anything in return.
Also, as a user, I want websites written by real humans. I do not want generic LLM output always has the same boring style. I like human writing, perfectly native English, broken second language English, I don't care. Human writing is unique and makes reading a pleasure.
Of course, even Google the search engine has gotten worse at surfacing interesting websites. First came the SEO spam websites, now the slop websites.
I used to use DuckDuckGo out of protest, despite it being inferior, but sometime in the last year (between general improvements and Google's rapid enshitification) it started outperforming Google for me.
It was only a matter of time. Watching how less technical people behave in the LLM era, I've noticed that most people no longer say "Google something", instead, they say "ask ChatGPT" or "ask chat". Many technical people have also stopped using Google for a lot of search queries and now just let an LLM find the answer.
According to Wikipedia "As of April 2024, Kagi listed that its sources for search results were derived from Google, Brave Search, Mojeek and Yandex" so I suppose Google won't be available there as a source anymore? And perhaps all others in the future if they choose the same path.
It's not clear to me from this announcement. The articles make it sound like all searches now go to ai mode and no more blue links.
But Google's description seems more minimal, like easier to get to ai mode, search box can expand intelligently based on input. Is there any clearer description of the magnitude of the change?
In my dreams, this is the moment Mozilla brings a search engine out of stealth mode, and says "sorry for looking like idiots for twenty years, we were secretly working on building a great search engine that doesn't suck or do AI"
Is “the goal of Search” really: “to help you ask _anything_ on your mind”?
If “reimagined Search” is “designed to anticipate your intent”,
Would it correctly infer my intent to not utilize an agentic approach? Is there an “off switch”?
As for “Search agents”
“operating in the background 24/7”,
What is the carbon footprint of that? How do I turn it off? How do I ask it to stop phoning home my every keystroke?
These questions are asked partly rhetorically because it’s likely I don’t need a team of “24/7 Search agents” to help me guess the answers…
Historically, I scoffed when someone said “here’s the difference between a google search and asking ChatGPT”, or when people said that ChatGPT would “kill search”, but Google sure seems to be in a hurry to burry the original feature all by themselves.
People saying ChatGPT will kill search, really mean LLMs generally will kill old school web searches that just return links. Google is doing this because they agree with the sentiment and are just becoming ChatGPT.
So how does google now make money when it is just providing us with direct answers from ai, instead of showing us both paid for search results and directing us to sites which host targetted ads?
How does adsense work when there are no search results?
I expect a flavor of affiliate marketing where you can never trust if the LLM is giving you the best recommendations or the most highly bidded recommendations
But how is this sold to the customer? With adsense it is quantifiable, you set your max per click, per conversion etc, and can clearly see which you won and lost against competitors.
This becomes very murky when paying for 'ai to like your product' vs 'ai to really like your product'.
Same per click, it obviously includes links when looking for products, but impression could also be counted and arguably especially if present in the first few sentences it is a valuable impression.
But then the separation of ads from content is lost so it becomes useless as product search, so maybe it isn't that trivial indeed. But it's not like even 10% of users is gonna find some other "search" engine and switch.
edit: can't reply deeper and interesting question, I mean we all would love to have ability to search arbitrary strings and regexes through the web corpus, but currently when you type something you get that AI reply instantly for most queries, this makes me still use them, if you forgot some shortcut key or something it has currently unique value in terms of latency (even ignoring the fact that for most users you also use them by default by typing in the address bar)
I think also they have the issue that now the google search box is just an ai prompt, what differentiates it from any other ai prompt like gpt or claude?
Did they just devalue their unique search product by pushing it into another category already dominated by other big players?
"The last episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is airing on Thursday, May 21, 2026. Based on your interest in The Late Show with Stephen Colbert you might also like the new Amazon Prime Video series of Last One Laughing, available to stream now"
You're missing the point. What incentive will websites have to create that content in the first place if you never visit? This was the contract with google adrev and website owners -- google would direct traffic to your site and hopefully they click around.
If google is now actively keeping you away from content, whats the point in creating?
Huh? These are my results when I put that prompt in:
The final episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert will air on Thursday, May 21, 2026, at 11:35 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.Final Week Broadcast DetailsThe Finale Date: Thursday, May 21, 2026.Air Time: 11:35 p.m. ET/PT.Where to Watch: Broadcasts live on the CBS Television Network and streams live on Paramount+ for Premium subscribers (available on-demand the next day for ad-supported tiers).Finale Guests: CBS is keeping the final episode's lineup completely under wraps, though the preceding days featured major appearances from Jon Stewart, Steven Spielberg, David Byrne, and Bruce Springsteen.Context of the FarewellThe 11th season finale marks the conclusion of Colbert's decade-long run as host, following a controversial cancellation announcement by Paramount Global. While CBS publicly attributes the ending to a financial decision amidst a shifting late-night market, media analysts and former host David Letterman have heavily criticized the move. Many view the cancellation as a corporate effort to avoid friction with the Trump administration during critical regulatory mergers. Following Colbert's departure, CBS will retire The Late Show franchise completely and hand the time slot over to syndicated programming.Watch Stephen Colbert confirm his final broadcast date on Late Night with Seth Meyers:31sStephen Colbert confirms his final show date and reveals ...Late Night with Seth MeyersYouTube• Jan 28, 2026Are you looking for information on how to attend the remaining tapings, or would you like to know more about what Byron Allen show is replacing his time slot?
Sometimes I hear lies and slander about big tech pulling up ladders and misusing their advantage to cement monopolies, but just look at this!
I believe I speak for everyone working on alternative search engines when I offer a heartfelt thank you to Google for their untiring effort to derail their search product.
Often, if you visit a few of the top PageRank-ish search hits for a query, you can find where the "AI" answer was mostly plagiarized from...
(For example, a random Redditor once said something, and the AI repeats it confidently and authoritatively, as if it is universal truth widely accepted by experts and applicable to the query.)
We've been in a vicious cycle where advertising has gotten less lucrative for websites, so websites start pushing more ads, which makes the websites less desirable to browse, which means less traffic, and the cycle continues with more ads.
It's no wonder LLMs are the new search, the user experience is much better and you get an answer that is "good enough".
Now any website that doesn't feel hostile requires you to download an app, log in with an account, or sign up for a subscription. Much like how streaming has had repercussions on traditional cable, AI will have repercussions on how we traditionally expect the web to function.
Same, came to google after DDG failed to locate a string that I suspect would occur (error message on Factorio forums). Google then gives me some LLM hallucinations about what the error might indicate, also when you specifically don't click the "use AI mode" button (that the search button automatically turns into) but the "search" button. You don't get any search results whatsoever. After it started wasting energy on hallucinations, you're allowed to click "all", meaning "web search, please" (should be obvious to anyone)
Why in the world would it specifically do this for site:https://example.org "exact string" queries?! I know what I'm looking for and where it can be found!
It's like redirecting my phone call from ISP support to a librarian because maybe the library contains the answer to a dysfunctional SIM card they've sent me
It seems they have been A/B testing killing search operators (like "site:" or "inurl:") for a while. They randomly stop working and switching to private mode, or the other way around, makes them work again.
So to make this profitable they need ads revenue from it, right? Imagine for a moment the ways AI can manipulate responses and conversations for marketers, because I guarantee the marketers have already thought about it.
The fact that steering one of these things is trivial nowadays and the vectors are close-to-free-to-store (since you don't need anything large to influence the space, see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahtbcExEKng) means that this is very likely already happening.
“AI safety alignment” implies political bias injection from the very start.
“We have to ensure models output text that is in line with the median politics of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors”, etc.
Not a stretch to go from there to “Of course the model should recommend Mountain Dew. It’s got electrolytes!”
"Hello, world! Welcome to the classic programming greeting. It is the traditional test message used to introduce beginners to computer science and verify that a language's syntax is properly understood"
Which clearly shows that there will be an avalanche of issues when non-technical people discover the joys of non-deterministic results.
One good thing about the (current iteration of) AI era is it’s getting people used to paying directly for data.
Yeah, of course i’d prefer information to be totally free. But if that isn’t possible, paying directly is far superior to paying for it via ad exposure.
The problem is that it amazingly easy to bias the weights and the actual size of the bias is tiny. So maintaining a per-user ad biased profile is cheap and profitable. I doubt that "paying directly" will keep out the ad men (after all, Cable TV cost money. Netflix too. Both have ads.)
When Google search first appeared it was miles ahead of the pack. There was no alternative worth using. They had a true monopoly insofar as nobody was able to compete.
Nowadays, if Google Search were to disappear, I would hardly notice. That would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. The alternatives to Google got better, and Google itself got a lot worse.
They still have the numbers but they don't have the product anymore and they're just juicing it until the end.
If Google changes the internet so that no one visits websites anymore, no one is going to make or maintain websites. And at that point, A) What is left of the internet and B) What is left for Google to summarize via AI?
LLM already took around 70% of my traffic. I live from that website. I don’t think it will survive another two years, and updating it already feels pointless. Why choose my words so carefully when Google will just scramble them?
Google: "The goal of Search has always been simple: to help you ask anything on your mind — from quick facts to the deep, complex or hyper-specific questions that can be hard to articulate."
Google search box has basically become an AI aggregator that doesn't give anything back to those websites it scraps data from, and it'll result in the death of the internet as we came to know it
At this point, google might as well stop showing website links in search results. with AI Overviews, barely anyone’s clicking through it anymore
So you can code in search now and create apps. No clue how that in depth works out. For them, the dream could be that everybody has their custom apps hosted by google.
It doesn't seem to be secure. If every google link is one step away from a prompt injection and leaking all your data, then they are worse then npm.
I wonder how many days it takes until they roll it back or put that stuff behind some extra clicks.
I no longer use Google search for simple coding questions, even though it uses a bunch of Claude tokens to ask, for example, what's the null-safe operator in JavaScript vs ruby because it sends half my project with the question, I'll still just ask in my ide rather than a google search.
I caught myself yesterday starting to ask Claude in my ide what ship did grace and Rocky take back to Rocky's homeworld.
This is to Open Claw what Google home is to Home Assistant.
I prefer the Claw like I prefer Linux and FOSS in general.
Since day one Googs’ vision was to make the Star Trek computer. They’re really there now. But I don’t like their how. This computer serves them, not me. My mind-bicycle must serve me, my thoughts are my own. I hope my resistance is not futile.
This might just do irreversible damage to my parents' generation. They already trust the AI overview with all of the thinking and synthesizing after making a search, and this will only make it worse.
Google search has been over for a few years already.
Nearly all other search engines give better results with less annoying ads at the top. First thing I do when installing a new browser is switch the default search engine to duckduckgo. Duckduckgo's results are less good than google used to be, bu way better than google currently is.
If you're looking for a search engine recommendation then I'll go againt all the bots and paid shills in this thread and say: Kagi sucks.
Kagi search results are very mediocre. Comparable to what DDG, Startpage and others provide for free.
Even though their search results are quite unimpressive the subscription is quite expensive and comes with extra fluff like AI tools that needlessly inflate the price.
Kagi sends a small part of their profits to russia by paying for yandex index.
They provide support via Discord thus it's safe to say that they endorse Discord even after recent controversies.
You're IT people, right? Take matters into your own hands and self host a SearXNG instance. Share it with family and friends to make yourself and everyone else harder to track and profile. Mooch off Google's infrastructure and don't give them anything in return. Fuck them.
Edit: Seconds after submitting already downvoted without any reply. Tell me Kagi is not running bots on HN.
Google search itself is becoming useless. It tends to promote social media results even when scarcely relevant, and just can't find things like part numbers that even baidu can find on English language pages. The AI then summarises social media posts.
>And I think we can throw out all the complaints of the past few years about how Google quality is lowering and it is hard to find anything on the site anymore, for those were the salad years.
>At least back in the day when sites copied answers from Stackoverflow or Lyrics from RapGenius and put them in their own site with scammy pitches to pay for the content you were going to get the correct answer in the end, but now you need a factology degree to figure out if something is bullshit or not.
Oh dear they made a terrible mistake right from the start.
> The goal of Search has always been simple: to help you ask anything on your mind
No. The goal of search is to find websites that match the text of the search term you put in. When they started to think they were "answering questions" is when google search started to become useless.
I understand the consternation here about this change. And I've noticed recently getting frustrated because I'm looking for a search list but the UI throws me into AI mode first. But the think is I use traditional search so much less now that those annoyances are the exception. I can't say whether they are making a mistake, but they've got to have extensive data, and I'm going to bet that an overwhelming amount of people don't click through to the search results anymore for most quick queries. They probably really don't have a choice if they are going to effectively keep ChatGPT at bay. Of course, all this is terrible for the internet. That headline should have been: The Internet as you know it is over.
In the last 10 (maybe longer) years I've noticed I've changed how I am approaching these changes.
In the past, I excited. It was the first to sign up for all kinds of betas.
I don't know what triggered the my reasoning, but now whenever I see these upcoming announcements I don't think about how it's gonna be better, but how it is objectively gonna be worse. How much harder is it going to be for me to compare things.
How much more do I now need to go and explain people that the output is merely a mathematical average of what's out there, and if it's out there on the internet doesn't make it correct.
The inability to do a proper search with “-x” x being a word you want excluded from the results but I can being able to have a convo about summary results is just mindblowing. I miss proper search. What’s everyone using for alternatives?
Up to now, the Gemini results they display are often worse and less accurate than the same question asked in Gemini. I'm guessing SEO has so thoroughly cooked Google's search results that they are actually holding back Gemini as a brand.
It looks like the new experience works backwards - it's more or less a Gemini prompt that they then stuff a "search experience" into.
Obviously the search feed and ads are so integral to Google's business model that they probably can't confidently just step away from it.
Every organization eventually is taken over by the people who operate within it effectively, to the detriment of the people who operate outside and provide the actual public value. Google’s making a terrible, though understandable, mistake. They think people go to Google to see what Google wants to show them. This is like the people who run the airport imagining that travelers are popping by to see the decorations.
They are surely hearing themselves say the same things about how Google is “everything in one place” that every failed corporation parrots on their way out.
Until you realize that Kagi only works well because it uses a (paid) third-party API which behind the scenes does a classic Google search, scrapes its results in real time, throws out the ads, and then returns the cleaned-up results.
If Google Search changes, then Kagi's search will be impacted directly.
The other search indexes are largely negligible in comparison: [0]
> This is not a competitive market. It is a monopoly with a distant second place.
> The search index is irreplaceable infrastructure. Building a comparable one from scratch is like building a parallel national railroad. Microsoft spent roughly $100 billion over 20 years on Bing and still holds single-digit share. If Microsoft cannot close the gap, no startup can do it alone.
Thanks for searching the source. It sounds to me like they are _not_ using Google nor Bing directly:
> With Google and Bing, we failed - not for lack of trying.
> Bing: Their terms didn't work for us from the start. Microsoft's terms prohibited reordering results or merging them with other sources - restrictions incompatible with Kagi's approach. In February 2023, they announced price increases of up to 10x on some API tiers. Then in May 2025, they retired the Bing Search APIs entirely, effective August 2025, directing customers toward AI-focused alternatives like Azure AI Agents.
> Google: Google does not offer a public search API. The only available path is an ad-syndication bundle with no changes to result presentation - the model Startpage uses. Ad syndication is a non-starter for Kagi's ad-free subscription model.1
And BTW, I think this is possible (perhaps, as someone suggested below, with smaller and niche-focused indexes). At Uruky we integrate with several independent search providers and indexes, and only one of them (Serper) uses Google's results indirectly — not the most popular (though it was added by pressuring demand). From our FAQ [1]:
> For web search, Uruky currently integrates Mojeek, Marginalia, EUSP (Ecosia/Qwant) (only works with French, German, or English), Linkup, Serper, and Uruky Site Search.
EDIT: Sorry, I re-read carefully the whole thread and it seems we're saying similar things. Your claim, from the start, is about the SERP, not direct search, which is supported by their blog post as well:
> Because direct licensing isn't available to us on compatible terms, we - like many others - use third-party API providers for SERP-style results (SERP meaning search engine results page). These providers serve major enterprises (according to their websites) including Nvidia, Adobe, Samsung, Stanford, DeepMind, Uber, and the United Nations.
The web would probably be a lot healthier if we had several small search engines that focused on niches rather than 5 failed search engines that tried to index everything that was ever written and then ended up paying Bing.
They also have their own index. But in any case, what matters here is the product UX itself not the internal details, and they do offer a classic search experience
The “magic” of the SERP is that it makes the organics product and the ads product reinforce each other: People come for the organics and don't have to pay. That brings eyeballs, which advertisers pay for.
If Google no longer sends users to websites for free on organics, the world will have to figure out some mechanism whereby Google pays site owners for putting the information on the web in the first place. Where will that money come from?
If it's ads, the AI experience is a “lies engine” where advertisers get to pick which lies the AI tells. Not sure what kinds of people would show up for that experience. Probably the same kind who watch home shopping TV. I would venture to guess that there will be a ceiling in the advertising value of that property. Or the AI interacts with people in good faith. But then, if I'm an advertiser, how do I get my lies into the world? “We will tell your lie, only if it's a truth” doesn't work because, as an advertiser, I understand that the truth about me already gets spoken, and I don't need to pay a dime for that.
You can run an argument that people can tell ads from organics on the current SERP, and you can calibrate how much of each there should be. But you can't really “calibrate” the amount and level of the lying in the AI to where it's just enough so that people will show up, but not so much that there's no value for advertisers. You can't have little boxes either, where the AI is like “having told you the truth, I want you to also pay attention to this lie that someone paid me to tell you: …”
Is Google really saying: “Hey, we're the lion's share of the advertising market right now. But, because we kind of like these newfangled AI things, we're going to just vacate that spot to whoever. Instead, we will turn ourselves into a pre-product-market-fit company. Maybe at some point over the next 10 years, we're going to be able to tell you how we might actually monetize ourselves. Stay toooooned.”
The reason why AI is a better experience than the web right now, is because we have pre-enshittification AI and post-enshittification web. What will the whole thing look like, after enshittification is through with AI?
With answers “someone on the internet wrote”, I miss knowing definitely that there’s no good or authoritative answer to my query on the internet. With those “people as clueless as you said…” answers it takes lot more time to understand that.
A lot of people in these comments have strong opinions about the performance of a service they use frequently, for which they pay zero dollars, and is run by a public company with a fiduciary duty to provide ROI to its investors.
I wonder how many of them would switch to a paid model that offered pre-ai-era google search?
They already did the capex. Might as well use it, it's not like it was being utilized otherwise. Must be awkward to see your $10B datacenter sitting at 10% utilization.
Whatever FB is doing going to invade your privacy.
Any Google product is either going to be cancelled soon or tries to further enclose internet on Google.
> 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.
...a high search volume tells me that maybe users aren't able to find what they're actually looking for, thereby needing more searches.
I know a lot of regular people who hate this, but Kagi can be a hard sell for regular people. What are y’all’s recommendations for free search engines at the moment? I used to rec DDG, but I feel like their results are much worse than Kagi’s at present
Happy Kagi user - what 'sold' me (albeit already working in the space) was the adage of "if you're not paying, then you're the product" - having my results being manipulated to be constantly advertised to was something I was prepared to pay a token amount to avoid.
"The goal of Search has always been simple: to help you ask anything on your mind — from quick facts to the deep, complex or hyper-specific questions that can be hard to articulate."
Really? My aim has always been to find a place off google that has the information that I'm looking for.
If the purpose of google search is no longer aligned with what I want from the product... then maybe that tells me all I need to know.
If you want a search engine... it sounds like that's not what Google is any more.
Why replace something deterministic with something non-deterministic? I can no longer tell someone "just google it" because I don't actually know what will come up...
I've been using google search, and all other products, less and less. i find a mixture of perplexity and chatgpt perform much better and find higher quality results faster.
the degoogling process will be a long haul but im determined to do it.
Google search results have been the worst part of every LLM I’ve used. I imagine the LLM specifically designed to use Google search is going to be the worst LLM.
I use Google daily, and yet I can't remember the last time I used their search box - all of my searching has been done through the browser URL bar for a long, long time. I wonder if similar changes are being applied to the Chrome URL bar?
Google is making the pivot. And they’ve got such a strong strategic position. Full-stack integration. They will survive and thrive in this new era. Search seems safe. Yet, other products are still vulnerable to encroachment.
I've found Google AI Search to be good for really topical searches. And its conversational ability has noticeably improved over the last year. I can now have a (short) conversation where I reference past messages.
Cool. I hope this blows up in their face and is reverted in a few months. I don't need my phone book index to suddenly not be an index and force me to use a call center instead.
Please no, I just tried Google searching for a specific popular software name, I knew exactly what it does, but I just didn't remember the name.
Searching for some keywords, returned only 2 or 3 websites, the rest were just ads, AI summaries, related busineses and whatnot, after 4-5 searches I gave up.
I then asked ChatGPT: "what's that software name that does X", and it gave me a list, and that software was the first one.
I did not start using Google because the results were better.
I started using Google because the interface was far superior in the time before adblocking existed and after Flash existed.
Search results were better because they did not contain hidden paid results.
Search was measurably improved with the second generation of Wikipedia. Google did an excellent job understanding this and tended to just place the Wikipedia article at the top. Also helpful for Google was that Wikipedia's original search engine was useless, similar for YouTube whenever it came around.
Today, I use Google less than once per month. I'm not sure I've been there at all this year. Maybe at the end of last year I was using it and found nothing better than I found on other search engines.
the thing that bothers me is I don't usually want this mode. When I search, I am not looking for what google thinks, I am looking for what other sources think.
Yes! And for actual research, I like to see a variety of sources and opinions, as well as some links to granular or primary data if apt. I don't even like A.I. summary of product reviews because they're SO bland and not needed. Even aside from the traffic-choking, content stealing insult to legit creator sites, it's like a giant, insidious flattener of human color and interest.
AI in search is worthless to me because of how many SEO AI slop spamsites are created daily, pretending to be regular newssites and regurgitating random crap that's always the first result when you search for specific things, like a combination of two popular search terms. This when fed into another AI adds a slayer of slop, so if you don't check the source, you can't know for sure.
Finally google search result ridden with ads and useless results will be replaced by chatbot answers also ridden with ads, unnecessary commenatry from the bot and ads.
Initially I thought AI would would crush google search, but starting to think the opposite. Think they have survived the transition.
After I got tired of perplexity's nonsense I realized the workspace account (which I have for custom email domain) came with fancy gemini pro chat.
Was a fucking ripoff for the domain thing...but domain plus premium chat clearly marked as "we won't train on your data"...the math starts mathing better again.
PSA: kagi is a great search that still actually searches, allows you to customize results, and only uses ai when you ask for it. Only catch is that it's a pay service. Definitely worth it IMO. You can still get info directly from source sites rather than laundered through an unreliable AI. Not affiliated, just a happy user.
I think perplexity implements the same. Ive been using it as a default search for a month and actually still find myself explicitly using Google instead.
The ai generated summaries are slow, often miss the point of question and seem to be focused on user engagement, not in giving set of infos to sort out myself.
So there are two different types of queries, and when I want llm's answer, I ask chatgpt directly.
How does a media company stay in business when there is no one visiting the site, and people are only getting the quality information from Google?
Advertising on the media site (assuming digital media, no physical media) is going to disappear because people probably won't be clicking through to read the source material that the Google AI answer relied on. No traffic, no advertisers, no money to produce the original journalism. That's going to impact the Google results eventually as these media outlets shut down to be replaced with...AI slop, maybe?
Is the subscriber model the answer? It could work for a niche subject or a single journalist with a following, and it wouldn't be sucked into Google results, either, if it was effectively gated/paywalled.
This is absurd, why is Google so desperate to kill the best thing they once had? I would love to know what happens inside a corporation to destroy itself in such way.
I also don't remember ever seeing anything being force-fed as much as LLMs, why?
Greed and lust for power. Judging by how most people interact with the internet these days I'm afraid Google will be fine. This is the new normal. Most people are so painfully dumb they delegate most of their thinking to ChatGPT anyway.
I'm pretty sure I had something very similar A/Bed at me by Bing the other day.
You know what I really miss? Being able to type a literal string in quotes and get pages that had that actual string on them. That's what I really miss.
How does this work for Google? I read it costs them $0.001 to perform a search. No matter how efficient their inference chips are, the new cost basis has to be 10X or more. And the zero click Internet not only kills ad supported content sites, it also kills Google SERP ad revenues.
I have to imagine that eventually ads will be integrated in, or they will change the layout so the ads are side by side with the AI and the SERP results underneath.
What we need now is back to the roots - just a simple grep for the internet augmented by pagerank and eventually some sort of ai and harness to sort the rubish out. The AI companies have the data and the harnesses.
Google killed themselves when they made sure you can't search direct quotes or outside of your region. If I am going to sort trough vague crap - it is better AI to do it. And AI doesn't look at ads.
There is real opening for a company that just crawls and gives access to other companies to build on top of the collected stuff.
It's been over for years. Google scares companies into bidding against each other just to be seen. It's a complete farce & a racket. It's the pay to play web.
I had Google search AI summary flat out lie about something and I don't know where it even got the wrong context from. I always have to take it with a grain of salt.
Leaving aside the user experience, how can this ve economically viable for them? Isn't inference still more expensive than normal search? (plus how do ads work?)
But they do AI chat already anyway so, maybe it's fine
I just want a relevant website ... no I don't want to use your agent. Just give me search results that are interesting to read, no AI slop, which teach me something new ... no I don't want to buy if I don't show this intent. Just serve the public interest and not your own financial interests.
Thank you.
That's why Kagi is the only subscription I don't actively think about cancelling. For the love of god, keep me away from Google and all of THAT. If Kagi goes down the same path, I'll selfhost something or just return to monkey and use link indexes and the favorites list + the native search of websites.
The boss man got a few of us Kagi gift-subscriptions/credits earlier this year, after we've been taking about wanting to try it. Before that I used Ecosia, which I also considered pretty good, but Kagi and everything else it just night and day.
I've been pretty sceptical about Kagi, feeling that it was a bit to expensive and perhaps just relying on other companies indexes to much and I spend to much time looking at how many searches I had left. After getting the subscription I just don't want to go back, the price is perfectly reasonable for the value. Being able to just search again and not sort through junk and spam and ads and just getting the pages I want and need is amazing.
Honestly it's a slightly weird feeling to look a the results from Kagi and notice it found exactly what you where looking for.
Once my gifted credits run out, that is going to be an easy renewal for me. I do not want to go back, even if I think Ecosia is a good option.
It's amazing how clear the manipulation and enshittification of Google's results are when you search the same thing with Kagi or even just another random search engine. Ecosia seems cool too, will keep an eye on it in case anything happens with Kagi.
It's actually not that hard now, once you get useful content. When I worked on Search (~2009ish), the primary index was called 4BBase, because it was the top 4 billion webpages (actually more like 5.5B during my time, but it had been around for a few years). A typical webpage is about 100K, and HTML compresses at 80-90% compression rates, so you're looking at 10-20K/page. The index would take about 50-100 TB.
Even after the recent AI run-up, disk prices are about $20/TB for a 20TB, so you can store this index on 3-5 hard disks that will cost you about $1200-2000. For self-hosted use you don't need to serve them in 50ms, so you don't need to put the whole thing in RAM like Google did, you can serve off of disk.
ElasticSearch uses basically the same data structures and gives you the same infrastructure that Google's ~late-00s search stack did, and is actually more advanced in some respects (like ad-hoc queries, debuggability, and updateability), so software isn't much of an issue.
The big part missing that can't really be replicated today is the huge web of authentic hyperlinks. The reason Google was so good at search was because many humans effectively "tagged" a given webpage with a series of short, descriptive words and phrases. When they went to search for a page, Google could mine this huge treasure trove of backlinks to identify exactly what the page was good for, even if those search terms never appeared on the page. SEO and link farms kinda killed this, as did the rise of social media walled gardens, and so the Google of 2009 basically wouldn't work today anyway. Maybe if you pulled old versions of Common Crawl or archive.org you could reconstruct it, but the relevant pages are often offline anyway today.
You can self-host Marginalia [1] or Hister [2], for example. Takes up some space, but it's totally doable. Your biggest problem (assuming you have disk space) will be crawling.
At least if we're speaking a more generalist web search it requires dedicated hardware, that's pretty costly. Marginalia's production server cost about $20k back when RAM and SSDs were cheap. It used to run on $5k of PC hardware before, but that was very limiting.
So no data center, but at the same time, not everyone has that sort of cash to throw around.
I wish they could remove the AI overview crap that's dysfunctional and kills the very spirit of a search engine's premise. You're not supposed to steal links from sites Google. That's a fucking dark pattern.
Anyways, I find that my $10/mo subscription to Kagi has been well worth not having to deal with Google's BS. (And they do offer AI if you want but they don't push it on you.)
For years already google has had integrations and more 'intelligent' responses for things like weather, shopping, answers to queries etc. This hardly changes any of that (most of the 'features' are inside AI Mode). For 'regular' uses this changes nothing. Avoid AI Mode most of the time. Double-check most automated overview options. And still not using any kind of chat interface when searching for sites, things, images, whatever. Hardly changes anything. And Google is still the destination for all lookups. With little to no reason to go looking for a different service especially not from any other AI-related firm.
Bring me Google before the instant search nonsense where I could go into rabbit holes 100+ pages deep.
Now it can't find anything interesting. As a search is basically useless and it's more like Home pages used to be (that you would very much build yourself in a html editor and place your most often visited sites).
barf but it at least opens up the playing field for new startups that want to provide good old index search and try to beat them where they left off when search still worked 8 years ago before they hired the yahoo POS execs that enshitified the service.
I haven't used google search as my default search engine in YEARS. DDG is good enough for 99% of my searches. Same with Google Chrome. Stop giving evil companies your traffic and attention.
This is great news. I remember Altavista, Yahoo and similar ones, they pioneered this type of home-page-is-all-you-need UI which is the perfect compromise of what product people at Google have come up with and what users want, at least according to their tests.
This means that, in a couple years, we might see a competitor that offers you quick, almost instant web search, with a minimal UI, possibly an algorithm that somehow surfaces the most relevant results based on how all websites point to each other naturally (like, a site that is referred to by 20 others should be above one with zero references).
Has the web been a meaningful experience since 2016? Before LLMs you might have visited 5 websites daily (besides utilities like banking / shopping /bills). Google concentrated on a handful of garbage-tier regime publishers with spammy ads. There were some holdouts like stack exchange and Wikipedia (at least attempting to produce quality content).
I think we can concede the WWW vision of distributed libertarian publishing has been dead for a long time. LLMs were just the final straw.
We ended up concentrating syndication on a few media companies like Google, Social Media companies.
Look at the profit margins of advertising companies vs producers and you’ll get an idea as to why.
While I can certainly see this upsetting some people, I'm not sure if this is necessarily "bad".
Web 2.0 was Yahoo Pipes, public APIs, IFTTT, etc. while this new "Web 3.0" acknowledges that those capabilities would rather be gatekept behind AI instead of entirely removed.
At the very least we do get some of that functionality back without resorting to scraping anymore and it's now accessible to the layperson. I would think this would nudge the layperson to demand more and inevitably want the actual data without the training wheels or sandboxes. Is that not a "good" thing?
Is the pushback against this out of genuine concern or just ideological?
Makes me sad. I recall the beginnings of Google, so hopeful so new.
Now they are a money printing corporate. I am sure there are still people there doing new and exciting things, but the Grey Suits have taken the reigns
They could have used AI to make that awesome simple sparse home page better. Fought off the SEO optimiser that made search so dire in the recent past
But no. They are doubling down on bling and crap. SEO is good for business.
huh, one downside of being an all-in Firefox and Kagi user, meaning I have everywhere firfox as default browser with kagi account configured, all laptops, tablets, phones, means I am now out of touch and never noticed.
... and an opportunity to try freeing yourself from Google influence more generally, by finding alternatives to their other services, like email, maps etc.
I think this will be one of those things that the hacker news crowd lambasts and calls a mistake but will either be neutral or seen as a positive to your average user.
I think you underestimate how many users loathe that "Generated with AI" box. But for me the bigger question is why they're going all in on this instead of a gradual rollout or a new tool offering.
I think people are sick of hearing about AI but they’ll embrace this change for the simple reason that they hate computers and want to feel like they’re taking to a human.
Yeh, my sense as well. I'm just out of college, and can tell you people my age use AI all the time and will probably be happy with this change. There is a diehard anti-AI group, but it seemed smaller all the time over the past couple years.
The average user may be fine with it (though I think many will not). But given this is basically killing the open web, I don't see where Google plans to get the results to feed this AI thing in a year or so
Agree, but the average user trusts the AI knowledge box as expert summary, even though clicking through often reveals contrary information, so this is going to be a net negative overall for a while…
The average user makes fun of how bad the Google AI generated responses are. I somehow don't think they're going to embrace a plan for that slop to be the only thing available.
Thankfully ublock origin blocks a ton of those useless AI slop spam, but Google nerfed its search engine already years before. They showed that they don't care about it anymore, yet alone about users. Something fundamentally changed at Google and it is not good. It is time for the world to retire Google. We don't want or need an adCompany nor an AI slop company.
No no, now it's intelligent. You don't get it, before it was just returning what you wanted to search for, now it uses a lot of compute to sometimes return what you were searching for and other times you get pretty cool hallucinations. It's like full circle back to the "I'm feeling lucky" , remember?
If you'd like to switch from Google, I'll take the opportunity to let you know about Uruky [1], an ad-free and privacy-focused search engine, that's focused on a simpler experience than Kagi (no AI). Kind of like "old school" search. My wife and I launched it earlier this year, and it's been going really well so far.
Id you'd like to try it for free for a couple of days, reach out with your randomly-assigned account number and we'll top it up for you.
Lots of people talking about Google being strictly worse than a number of search engines (bing, duck, etc) not been my experience. Brave default search is awful. Duck was terrible last I used it. Google still great for me, but I have a decent amount of "privacy controls" implemented (DNS, vpn, browser extensions) and i basically dork most searches--average search looks more like a find invocation than English. In this last regard especially, Google is peerless, imo
Been a while since I looked around though. Is there an engine that supports all the operators that Google does and that provides results of better or equivalent quality?
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