Posted by HelloUsername 2 hours ago
I'm sure the model is fine, but it's not Google Search, and when I want Search I want Search. If I wanted to ask an AI, why can't I ask the one from my subscription... that I'm already paying for... that's actually good... that can also search the web?
I assume it's a play to test the waters for how the ad market is going to work, because as a product I really can't see why I would ever use it. Dropbox comment moment incoming?
I think this is a step beyond that - why should people be creating cooking websites when you can ask LLM how to cook given thing, while indeed, serving their own ads. It's the continuation of "we own content other people produce" policy
They killed their competition and now they will give you the product that gives them the most money.
Not me. I really appreciate having both results simultaneously. I can scan the first couple sentences of the AI response, and if that already has the answer then great. I can expand it to see if there's more.
Or, if I see that the AI mode didn't understand my brief search query, I just glance at the search results below.
And often times, when I do need to follow a link, I find the source result links in the AI mode to be a better quality than the search result links.
It's the best of both worlds.
Users aren't adopting their AI at the rate shareholders expect, so they now force the adoption at the cost of search.
>Just one year after its debut, AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users, with queries more than doubling every quarter since launch. As people have realized just how much more Search can do for them, they’re searching more than ever before — so much so that last quarter, we saw queries reach an all-time high.
>Another place where we’ve been rapidly innovating is in the Gemini app. Last year at I/O, the Gemini app had 400 million monthly active users. Today, we’ve surpassed 900 million, more than doubling in a year. In that same time, daily requests have grown over seven times.
Of course they have more AI queries every day. They have full control over what goes to LLMs and what doesn't.
I'm not entirely sure I'm buying that, unless users keep prompting the AI to reduce the amount of reading they need to do. Sort of interrogating the AI, rather than reading a Wikipedia page.
No, it's not. AI mode is something you have to select (in the search window). There is an AI overview provided with your basic search results.
I wonder how much the search results thing is related to language and locality. I have a hunch but I haven't really dug into it.
I live in the US, I speak English, and my browser is normally chrome.
The number of times I've gone to the 2nd page in Google search results you can probably count on one hand in the last 15yr or so.
I use the standard Google search things when I want specifics... Using quotes, site:news.ycombinator.com to search a site, or add a "-" to remove results from that site. I use a "+" when needed. Nothing fancy.
When people say they can't find things in Google search, I'm genuinely baffled. I have a strong suspicion that it has something to do with the combination of browser, locality, and language. Why? Could be tons of reasons for that, some probably anti-competitive on the browser side.
I have tried to use ecosia, start page, duckduckgo, etc. Was never happy with those results and always ended up back at Google search.
I just want to know what's different, you know? I look up some pretty obscure stuff sometimes.
Note: I do normally have my Google account logged in in the browser when doing search, however I have search personalization and history turned off, so that should not be influencing the quality of my search results compared to whatever "baseline" is.
Technically, all the people who google "how do I disable this shitty AI mode in google" would count as "driving an increase in total search queries."
An easy way to make a feature popular is to force it on everyone. Then you can pat yourself on the back when 100% of your users are using it!
Because Google wants to kill off its search engine here. It is very clear.
> I assume it's a play to test the waters for how the ad market is going to work, because as a product I really can't see why I would ever use it. Dropbox comment moment incoming?
This assumes that Google search is still a high priority for Google. With their privatized adNetwork, they are trying to get people to trust them, and abuse users via their ads. That is their business model. Google is an adCompany. It stopped being a tech company many years ago already.
Also they control the adMarket for the most part. Just look at youtube.
...and it really hasn't been for a good number of years now. I left a while ago when results were all SEO copy pasta blogs this is just a final nail in the coffin.
Of course DDG / others can do the exact same thing as they already have an AI mode. Maybe you can even set up ChatGPT as a search engine - not sure. The key for this use case is speed - it has to be nearly instant.
This is the exact use-case, and it makes a lot of sense. The hard part for Google is identifying when someone wants search and when someone wants an AI response. It's somewhat identifiable by the input but of course thats extremely messy to determine systematically.
The problem is that's not discoverable though. The toggle on google.com would be nice but most people probably arent searching that way.
If Google isn’t carefully they’re going to push people away from their golden goose.
My friends who previously had no interest in technology and never talked about it, are suddenly following tech news closely all because they have fear of missing out on AI :(
That's been my experience too, both with friends and coworkers.
It would seem that the negative sentiment around AI is largely an internet phenomenon. I've yet to run into a hardcore "AI skeptic" irl. People seem either neutral, or enthusiastic about it.
Personally, I like it sometimes, but I'm a techie and understand the limitations, and I dislike not being given options to use or not use it.
Just because Google used to do search as their main point of business does not mean that holds true today. Holding on to the false premise will only add to your confusion about their decisions.
Ads make the money, but Search is still the consumer facing product that brings people to Google and keeps them there. It’s so ubiquitous people don’t even think about it or notice it anymore.
I’m always surprised by how much people are still searching for stuff as we’ve moved from the open web to various platforms (Amazon, TikTok, Facebook, etc), but every time I see Google’s revenue breakdown I’m shocked by just how important Search still is to their business.
This is from 2024, but shows Search accounting for nearly 57% of revenue. Yes, this is made possible by the AdWords business, but without Search, that 57% goes away, unless that traffic goes to a 3rd party that is also using AdWords and Google were to make the same from 3rd party ads as 1st party. I find that doubtful.
https://www.doofinder.com/en/statistics/google-revenue-break...
AI is going to be great at pushing ads. Plus AI trains you to give google even more control. Instead of just presenting you with a list of websites offering different perspectives and opinions on something, Google can just tell you what they want you to know/think (or not tell you anything they'd rather you not know/think about). The more you get used to treating google like an oracle instead of a librarian the easier it will be to manipulate you.
Could you elaborate on this? What ad company did Google buy?
Couple that with the fact that a lot of folks have moved their search to GPT or Claude once those platforms start taking in ad money... that budget will come from somewhere and that's likely existing Google ad buy dollars shifting.
Its search results ordering is quite good, but the accessible information for them seems to be shrinking. And quickly.
I’m at the point where I don’t search for complex things anymore. I use Kagi for things which can be found with any search engines. Not because I chose it, but because I was forced. This was not the case a few years back, when I started to use it.
Btw, there was one thing with which Google was superior all along: define <word>. And they fucking killed it in the past months, for a far, far worse solution. Nothing comes even close.
> The DuckDuckGo mobile app saw installs spike in the US by 18.1% on average compared to the previous week. TechCrunch reported this growth was sustained over six days, peaking at 30.5% on May 25. An even greater number of iOS users hit download on the app though, with installs seeing an average week-on-week growth of 33% and a peak of 69.9%.
Why do they report only relative numbers? These numbers alone are meaningless. This is just lazy reporting.
I love Google's AI answers and their AI Mode tab. DDG is just Bing or a search vendor proxy, so I've never understood the fascination. At least Perplexity is different to Google. DDG seeing a 28% increase is like Google saying they saw a drop of 0.0000000001% in traffic.
HN crowd forget that the world isn't like us, they didn't grow up with Yahoo and Alta Vista, with Excite etc etc. Our SOP is to resist all change, anytime Apple brings out a new version it'll be the end of Apple according to HN - Apple - the biggest company in the world - what do they know about UI, "Liquid Glass sucks!" :) :)
We're a community in danger of pushing out those new to the tech world, recent graduates will be made to feel unwelcome if we continue to trash everything that the biggest companies in the world do, like we always know better. I implore the community to be more positive about the future, about the technologies that will take us into that future.
Don't you have to do that _anyway_? Unless you're just blindly trusting the AI to be correct, and if that's the case, please do enjoy gluing your cheese to your pizza.
And supposing these technologies do take us into the future: when said future is bleak and worse in most ways than what came before, people aren't going to be encouraged or enthusiastic about the tech world.
For as much as how the startup space loves to pay lip service to contrarian bets, people sure do all be running in the same direction.
For the search, some of the local results are wrong but I live in a very small area so it may be more reliable for highly populated areas. Lately I've been checking out Kagi for a few things just to see what the quality is like on competition. The anonymized chat (proxy) for AI is cool but very small context limit. Good for looking up random questions and they typically include references.
Recently I switched to Kagi and has been a very happy customer. I never visited Google after that. Only downside is the Search on mobile. You have to install an app and enable it as extension on safari. Logging in never worked and couldn't enable my premium Kagi on iPhone.
However, I find that most of my queries don't require Google to find the result. Maybe once every couple days I do a search, don't like the results, and then add a "!g". Most of the time it's fine and I get to avoid Google's ecosystem.
Google search had degraded so badly pre-AI, I was already finding it equivalent for most things. The odd few searches benefit from Google, but nowhere near enough to warrant them as a default.
I personally have had to use DuckDuckGo to search for things that Gemini finds to be against its instructions to answer.
And I'm not talking about things that are NSFW, but some things that Gemini just doesn't want to discuss.
That's kinda Gemini's problem in general, it just is overly restrictive and doesn't like to talk about anything things that Claude will freely talk about and push against and discuss with you.
For other things, Grok is quite fast — Perplexity too