alt Hacker NewsGoogle changes its search box
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Nilay Patel has been talking about "Google Zero" - the moment when Google effectively stops sending any traffic to other sites - for a few years now: https://www.theverge.com/24167865/google-zero-search-crash-h...
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from multiple sources, it can also get things wrong by combining information from different eras or just plain outdated advice.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.
It’s diverged quite a bit from the original:
<form method="GET" action="/search">
...
<center>
Search the web using Google!
<br>
<input type="text" name="query" value="" size="40">
<br>
<select name="num">
<option value="10" selected>10 results
<option value="30">30 results
<option value="100">100 results
</select>
<input type="submit" value="Google Search">
<input type="submit" name="sa" value="I'm feeling lucky">
<br>
<i>Index contains ~25 million pages (soon to be much bigger)</i>
</center>
...
</form>
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.
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 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.
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.
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!!!
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.
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?
Kind of Google to create a market opening for its competitors like this. I hope Kagi, Bing, and DuckDuckGo are taking notes.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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?
First signs of the death of google.
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.
Google stopped being a customer-focused company after their 2nd major revision to GOffice and the PM shake-up in search from Raghavan https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ .
So many questions:
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.
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.
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.)
I've noticed this since yesterday when i tried to do a site:url search, it gave me an AI chatbox and answer
Also their universal shopping cart seems to be quite a change too https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/shopping...
AI search.. they should at least put that behind a "I'm feeling unlucky" button
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.
tried it out:
Search: "Hello world"
> AI Overview
> Hello! Wordle is the viral word-guessing game where you get 6 tries to uncover a mystery target word, using color-coded hints to guide your guesses.
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...
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
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.
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.
I think I've had this on duckduckgo for several months
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?
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.
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.
NYT found 10% of answers are wrong
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/technology/google-ai-over...
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.
I think I'll be getting a Kagi subscription.
Hmm, perhaps should switch fields and become a factologist
https://medium.com/luminasticity/artificial-stupidity-and-th...
>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.
The last product i thought google would kill, that isn't ads, the true end of an era with an underwhelming bang.
I wonder if they will stop using pagerank completely? Has pagerank already transcended the software plane?
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
Ask Joogle or Ask Geeves?
https://www.techradar.com/computing/search-engines/ask-jeeve... / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask.com
Ask Jeeves was dissolved 15 days ago
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.
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.
[1]: https://uruky.com
To change anything on the home page of google, amazon, etc, must be a hair-raising experience for the people making those changes.
I haven't used Google search for years. It's almost totally irrelevant at this point and existing on pure inertia.
I'm aware that most people still use it, but it's nothing like the glory days when Google was far ahead of the pack.
>Google’s AI Overviews will also allow users to ask follow-up questions in AI Mode, beginning Tuesday, the company noted.
have i been A/B tested into something, or has this been live for months? this doens't seem new.
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.