alt Hacker NewsGoogle changes its search box
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Feels a bit like New Coke
I miss having a good search engine. Even before AI.
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.
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.
Where are the PageRanks of yesteryear?
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.
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.
As long as udm=14 still works I'm fine on a personal level. It's still bullshit that they're going to push it as the default
God, this is just as awful as Microsoft trying to push copilot into everything, trash.
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.
Google has become exclusively an advertising company long time ago, it's stopped being a search engine since years.
"Did you mean?" + excluded word was a pretty clear indication they stopped caring to provide any meaningful search whatsoever.
Google search has been dead for years.
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. I switched to Kagi during the pandemic and haven't looked back.
There is a lot at stake for Google - that search box has firehosed cash non stop into the company money bin for decades.
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.
The shark has fully cleared it’s jump.
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.
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.
I suppose it would not be in line with their business plans to make google search actually search again.
what a weird surface to put LLMs
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.
I haven't missed it since switching to Kagi.
Kagi is a great alternate.
Privacy first, opt-in AI, total control over site blocking, zero ads.
You're the customer, not the product.
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).
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.)
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.
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).
I look forward to it!
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?
Glad I switched to Kagi
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.
duckduckgo.com
F Google!
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.
"Do the right thing". Not even close
Makes me so sad.
damn this is some real slop. not expected from google.
i played the video, didnt understand anything and got dizzy. then i tried to scroll but the browser tab froze? wow
Slop as a Service (SaaS)...
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.
of course; ever since ChatGPT first launched it was clear this is what Google would do to its search
good luck getting visits to your site unless you're paying for AI placement
The entire internet as I knew it is over. Everything trips Cloudflare and capcha's because of tech bros and their AI crusade.
But at least I've experienced the golden age. I feel bad for all the kids who will never know what once was.
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I genuinely feel like I could have a breakdown over this.
I’m so fucking tired. I don’t want it. I didn’t want it. I didn’t need it. And now here we are, once again, shoving it fast and hard in my face.
Thanks, Google.
On the upside, perhaps the LLM will understand the intent of search operators now.