alt Hacker NewsYeah, 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.
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This is fascinating, contrarian viewpoints are rare, so can you elaborate?
Google's AI is solid, but a lot of its benefit comes from the fact that it hasn't been enshittified into the ground like their search. The plain incontrovertible benefit is that it has the potential to reduce clicks from the user - instead of sending the UX through clicking into sites and then back to the main search pane the information is immediately available. That click through ends up being expensive for three main reasons 1 - the site is sometimes potato though google "solved" this with amp, 2 - it takes a while to scroll to the site entry passed all the sponsored links (a problem google created for themselves) and 3 - paywalls and "Please subscribe to our newsletter" popups are legion, but while this was always a little bit of a problem, it is a much more pronounced problem due to 1, the insertion of amp that threatens financial ruin on being crawled by google.
So, at the end of the day Google's AI is better than ye olde Google Search, and ye olde Google Search is now very difficult to accomplish because of how much Google has poisoned the well. Kagi is excellent but most normal people can't stomach paying for search when there's a "free" alternative so your options are Google's AI, Google's Search or and alternative search - most normal folks don't realize non-Google search alternatives exist (outside like Bing) so Google's AI ends up capturing a lot of usage.
Google's search AI caused a panic in my household just several nights ago. We were looking up an issue with our pet and the very first thing my partner saw searching google was an AI answer saying you need to panic, this is an emergency, get your animal to an emergency room asap before they die. That of course kicked her into Oh Shit mode. But aside from that answer none of the actual search results either of us were finding backed up the AI.
We had to decide whether or not to drag our pet to an after hours emergency vet, with all the associated stress and cost, or ignore the AI result and go off everything else we were reading. It's one thing to dismiss AI answers that seem wrong when it's a domain I know well or the stakes are low, but this was not that type of scenario.
In the end we opted to ignore google's AI and fortunately it was absolutely the right call. So, thanks google.