I started to find that the AI bit was the most useful part of Google Search. But the actual search results were terrible and now I use Kagi. I like being able to add a question mark and control what becomes AI and what doesn't. I use normal search like a Ctrl F for the internet and don't want it to be too clever.
My non-tech savvy mother started reading the stuff the Google Search AI answers to for some searches, and she's already fed up with it saying whatever. To her it doesn't matter that the "AI can make mistakes" because (in her own wording) "if it's faulty, don't answer".
There's a difference between "linking to a source that may be incorrect" and "you providing the text that's blatantly wrong", and Google seems too big to care about it.
AI was ever useful for searching stuff?
I find that those "AI summaries" google tends to use by default, are hallucinating liars. I stopped wasting my time with this AI slop spam in general. Any "human" still using AI and targeting me, gets perma-banned without any further discussion. I kind of need ublock origin for EVERYTHING. (Ublock origin is great, but I need this on every level, blocking AI slop spam, blocking Nate's donation-daemon nag-widget for KDE and so forth - ok, the last one is easy to disable, just patching out the part where Nate thinks it is ok to harass people, but for AI slop spam from external sites I need something more effective than ublock origin, kind of like an ublock colossal shield.)
I find it takes me more time... sometimes it has the answer, often it has pure bullshit. I need to verify everything that comes out of it myself before repeating at anyway.
If people are just naked copy-pasting that field... which, ugh, of course they are... they are doing themselves and others a disservice.
> But the actual search results were terrible
I think it's reasonable to assume that Google artificially nerfed its search engine before they pushed so massively for AI.
Yeah, gonna be honest. I ridiculed people for it before, but now I use Google's AI a lot. I haven't used Google in over a decade otherwise and I still don't. I use Brave for search but Google's AI is better than anyone else's for what I do. You heard it guys, I was wrong. I admit it.