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Posted by giuliomagnifico 1 day ago

Study: Young users (9 to 18Y) ditch Google for AI, with unknown consequences(norwegianscitechnews.com)
65 points | 118 commentspage 3
dathinab 23 hours ago|
for a huge amount of "non tech-people", the thing is:

- they mainly look at the first Google result and sometimes if it looks "not convincing" the next few. Especially on a phone where the screen space will cut out most results without scrolling.

- a lot of them write (partial) questions instead of "search queries"

- the first result is an AI response which is very good at being "convincing looking" even if it's plain wrong. (And the others they might look at are nearly guaranteed bought.)

soooo

I don't think much changes for most people.

Sure Google Search AI response links some sources (but not many and it's not that rare for them to not really be sources for the _full_ answer...).

But so do (some) AI agents.

Through the naivety with which I see people trusting AI is very scary.

This makes me wonder if following statement:

> Of 139 studies on the effect of AI on critical thinking, 67 reported only positive effects of AI use.

is a side effect of the studies using sub-par methodology or if I have some observation bias.

Like the problem is many people filer trust by "who they ask", "if the question is hard", "if people might have a reason to lie". But the problem is AI works so differently that you can't trust it in _any_ question, even causal questions where (close to) no westerner(^1) would consider lying to you and everyone would either know they don't know or have the right answer...

(^1): Some cultures for "politeness" reasons value "giving a answer" over "saying I don't know", especially if the person won't see you again. That is getting much better AFIK in such cultures but can be a problem when e.g. asking for the way...

qoez 23 hours ago||
The non overreacting take is probably that young people will still have plenty of interaction with parents and their peers etc to develop critical thinking as a guard against deception and whatever else. Definitely some low single digit people without a social support system around them will develop AI psychosis though.
asdff 23 hours ago|
If only media literacy wasn't in such short supply these days among parents and peers.
Cakez0r 23 hours ago||
Nice presupposition in the headline that children using Google® is the good, safe and natural order of things and that using AI is bad, scary and dangerous
otikik 23 hours ago||
well, if you let the quality of your search results go down, people will look for alternative.s
jdw64 23 hours ago||
Googling itself lacks credibility. Most of the results are plastered with Google ads. And since Google ads mostly skip any kind of review process, there are a lot of bad ads.
ls612 1 day ago||
Never mind kids, I’ve largely started asking Claude any nontrivial questions that I used to Google. It’s night and day the difference.
codedokode 1 day ago||
Yes if you search anything in Google, you typically get sites that have a cookie panel, ask to allow notifications, show "Login With Google" popover taking the keyboard focus, and lot of ads before you can even read the content. No wonder people do not want to use Google anymore.
netdevphoenix 1 day ago||
To be honest, that's the fault of the websites themselves. Google is just an amplifier of a world web wide problem.
luka598 23 hours ago|||
While true, google can punish them by ranking the offending sites lower than non offending ones.
Macha 23 hours ago||||
I think we can blame google for the login with google prompts given they provide an SDK for that exact use case.
Gareth321 23 hours ago|||
It's symbiotic. Google has been aggregating data from these websites for years to serve as summaries in search, reducing traffic to the sites. More pernicious is AMP, where the site is basically copied to the Google server. This force websites to use AdSense and structure the content in certain ways. If a site doesn't want to use AdSense, or allow Google to summarise the site, it gets down-ranked in search. A death sentence. Further, Google's algorithms routinely promote spam because this is most profitable for Google. Hiding the important information 3/4 of the way down a 10,000 word article with a hundred different kinds of ads on the page. Since the "good" websites have to compete with these spam websites, they either adapt or give up monetisation.

One of the more horrifying stories to read was about [Code Yellow back in 2019.](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-2019-code-yellow-blurr...) Google's algorithms were getting too good. Users were finding what they wanted too fast. They'd type in their query, the first result was good, then the user would close the tab. For Google, this meant less ad revenue. They wanted users to stay on Google for longer. *So they chose to degrade the algorithm quality.* Users would have to click multiple links to find the information they wanted, and inside every link was ads served by Google. This is one of the pivotal moments in one of the worst cases of enshitification in software history.

o_m 23 hours ago|||
I use Kagi Assistant. It doesn't just give a summary, it is more like a personal "Googler"/web surfer. I feel like I'm involved in the process.

My coworkers use Google and often quote back the AI summary me instead of checking the source and referring to that. It's scary seeing even those with higher education behave like this.

Tade0 23 hours ago|||
The other day I found that one old game of which I originally caught just a glimpse and remembered only a fragment of what one voice actor was saying is in fact Lords of Magic.

I attempted to google this a few years ago to no avail.

amelius 23 hours ago||
For most things, it's the same with Gemini and it is faster.
IAmGraydon 12 hours ago||
My wife owns a small retail business (direct to consumer, online only), and ChatGPT is now sending her more buyers than google. If someone asks ChatGPT for the best product in the category she sells in, it answers with her business (as well as a couple of others, but she's the first and most recommended seller).
ekjhgkejhgk 22 hours ago||
Google itself isn't great either. It's biased by google's interests. The fact that users don't have control over how documents are retrieved is a problem and hopefully everybody understand why google's results keep getting worse.
okasaki 23 hours ago||
Well, we ditched books for Google with unknown consequences. Let people work how they want.
ReptileMan 23 hours ago|
Case study of 1, way above 18 - usually my search is - please research/find this in chatgpt. Google really need to fix the quality of their output and ranking.
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