Study: Young users (9 to 18Y) ditch Google for AI, with unknown consequences

AI is my default for just about any search now. From today:

How did Cantor come up with his diagonal proof? It seems to have been dreamed out of nowhere

Why are there advertisements for a shampoo containing caffeine? Does caffeine do something useful other than when you drink it?

What happens in sense and sensibility?

All of them give a decent answer, with the ability to ask follow ups. Eg, how does S&S compare with Pride and Prejudice? What about more recent novels connecting romantic choices with economic choices?

All of them give you links to source material, in case you suspect they are just making it up.

At the start of the millennium, Google search changed everything about how I look for information. Now it seems outdated.

Somehow a homemade problem for Google.

I never asked them to waste additional resources by injecting my blunt keyword-query into an AI-cluster and guesstimate a well-formed article from that.

But here I am, with (elder) relatives sending me Google search-results on topics like they are proper articles...

I use LLMs every day as a search engine replacement, but I’m concerned about this because there’s a vast gulf of capabilities between different models, or even the same models with different reasoning depths.

Back in the day everyone had essentially the same Google, and there was no concept of paying to get better search results. But now the average family is going to rely on the ad-ridden ChatGPT Free tier which is more likely to be wrong, less in depth, with additional commercial incentives. It’s only a minority of adults now that pays for frontier models, and how many are letting their children have access?

You can see this divide right now with medical advice for instance. If you have access to ChatGPT 6 Pro (only available for the $100/month tier I think), it will research Pubmed etc and give you a careful measured answer that likely reflects the latest medical consensus, while a casual user relying on Google AI might be told to eat toilet paper to relieve constipation: https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/1wmbn87/a_pt_show...

> "with unknown consequences"

Beautiful. I shall consider suffixing every random observation I have or action I take with that, for an extra infusion of ominosity and importance.

Even Google itself is now just asking AI. Usually the AI summary Google returns is more useful than the links. I get really annoyed when I query something and no AI summary is given as the links it returns these days are trash.

Funny enough, I believe when SEO pivots to prioritizing Ai, Google results will get better again. Currently there is probably no way Google can tune their search that won't be gamed by SEO abusers.

Nice presupposition in the headline that children using Google® is the good, safe and natural order of things. Using AI must be bad, scary and dangerous

Top of Google’s page is just a worse version of AI, followed by three or four sponsored result, then SEO optimized crap and finally what I’m looking for is probably near bottom of the results page- I’m not surprised at young people ditching Google

Is this surprising? Google has been returning poor results for a long time.

On the bright side, they're probably less subject to advertisement then when using "free" search agents

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.

Well, if Google search actually returned anything useful, other than the SEO-rigged trash and AI generated slop it pushes forward as results to queries, then there would be a reason to actually use Google.

For the time being, AI seems to be doing a much better job in most cases, so as we say: So long Google!

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...

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

AI is becoming the access path to the internet content the way internet became access path to writing, audio and video.

Very skeptical - the source material is

    studies published between 2022 and 2025 that examined the use of GenAI in relation to students

    173 records (studies) were included in the review

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.

The same discourse happened when Google appeared.

"you should not google, you should use a web directory, you will get exposed to a more diverse set of sites, not just what google pre-digested for you"

"you should not google, you should go to a library and search in physical media instead, google is for lazy people who can't think for themselves"

Well, we ditched books for Google with unknown consequences. Let people work how they want.

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 network around them will develop AI psychosis though.

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.

well, if you let the quality of your search results go down, people will look for alternative.s

Never mind kids, I’ve largely started asking Claude any nontrivial questions that I used to Google. It’s night and day the difference.

Recently my friend took out her phone and started googling by pecking virtual keyboard. It felt like a throwback to times long gone. Something akin to pulling out a walkman and decisively pushing in a mechanical button to start the playback.

I barely use Google Search for anything anymore.

It was garbage before LLMs got good, and the deep thinking models leapfrog whatever it used to be in its heydey.

Most teachers now use AI for lesson planning (talk to any teacher). Some even for marking when they can.

Children probably use more critical thinking in the playground and interacting with other children than in class, because classwork is mostly slop anyway.

LLMs are not going to one shot answers in Minecraft through the chat UI. Possibly a more effective resource than checkbox activities at teaching "critical thinking" (abused term in education).

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