A look at what’s next for AI and Google Search [video] | Hacker News Reader

A look at what’s next for AI and Google Search [video]

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65 pointspallas_athena64 comments

Wow, what a terrible marketing video.

Everything is moving so fast, I can't really tell what I'm supposed to get out of it. All the videos playing in the search results seem highly irrelevant, I assume this won't be in the actual product, the marketing folks just thought it looks cool?

In the end, all I got out of it, as a technical person, is that there will be an LLM engine in there.

I've tried to watch it, but a cognitive overload happened. Too many things going on and too fast. Is the target audience 3 to 5 y/o kids?

This is why you don't hire pewdipie as marketing directory.

Unlike Apple commercials that are filled with technical details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S8L7t2tu0U

That one takes about 40 seconds and it shows pretty much nothing, it's just a cartoon taking pictures and very easy to follow. If they just want to let people know that there's a new iPhone out, that does the job.

Meanwhile the Google one I just watched it and I know I saw a bunch of AI features they're adding, but I couldn't tell you what a single one of them is.

> it shows pretty much nothing

You would think that the commercial is an opportunity to convince people why they should want to buy the new phone. The only selling point they show the color yellow. To me this only demonstrates that the new phone is not worth an upgrade unless you really want yellow.

> Meanwhile the Google one I just watched it and I know I saw a bunch of AI features they're adding, but I couldn't tell you what a single one of them is.

I agree it's vague, but I'm giving them a break because it's not even released yet. It's not totally void of information though. Didn't you at least gather that they're integrating generative AI features into search? Did you see the new "ask a follow up" feature? Or the "make me a training plan" example?

It’s not like that’s the primary ad for iPhones. They didnt show this at WWDC. It clearly is about yellow, which for many people is more important of a driver than you clearly think.

> It’s not like that’s the primary ad for iPhones

It's the ad they blast all over TV, so I'm not sure what you mean. It's also a month old with 20M youtube views.

It just seems a bit hypocritical to criticize Google's ad for lack of information while defending Apple's.

> If they just want to let people know that there's a new iPhone out, that does the job.

Isn't the point of this video just to let people know that there's a new AI in search? It seems to do that job.

I think the HN audience is very interested in the technical details (myself included) and so is trying to parse the video more deeply than most people will.

I agree that it does that job. The criticism is that it's very confusing. If they just wanted to let people know they're adding more integration with AI in their search, they didn't need such a confusing video. And if they wanted to showcase the specific features then they should have given people time to process them.

Have you seen someone use tiktok? attention spans are dead

I suspect the experience of using it is muddled visually and in the UX. The fast presentation allows them to gloss over this.

> Wow, what a terrible marketing video.

I thought it was great. Full of excitement, showed useful results after joining sub-queries. That's exactly what people need to know.

"Search will keep evolving to answer any question in any format"

I can't help but think who/what is going to pay/feed the training data for all this innovation.

As a content creator, this feels like the bottom in the race to the bottom. Google was already keeping users on their site as long as possible (e.g. snippets), this will only worsen the bounce ratio from content creators like local news sites & niche blogs (worse ad performance, less sign-ups) who fuel traffic. It also feels like an extinction event for sites like StackOverlflow and Quora, gamification to get users to write 'free' content will die-off if Google keeps front-running sites like this.

I feel Google will eventually need to go into the content creation/syndication business to keep all this going (and pay up vs. Google News), because the incentives for everyone else are just not there, if they want to keep everyone on Google.

Webrings, we need webrings back.

Search is fine for people searching for something, but when just "surfing" or browsing for interesting stuff, we end up on this site, or some other centralised site that will constantly try and pull value from the creator back to the owned site (like Reddit, Facebook etc).

A creator owned way to surf and discover (like the old webrings) would be great.

Hacker News itself is kind of a webring, isn't it? The variety of stuff that gets shared here makes it the perfect discovery for tech oriented people.

Kinda, but it's not creator owned, which I think is the key thing here.

Is there still webrings like there used to be?

There are not many webfingers left to put webrings on any more, I'm afraid.

I used to love stumbleupon, which kind of is a webring? (I had to look up the definition). I think the business model is just not as profitable in these days of engagement metrics

Google needs to keep up, the people have spoken and this is exactly the main selling point for ChatGPT. Most users love how they don't ever have to leave the screen compared to Google that just sends you to a bunch of sites of unknown trustworthiness

> that just sends you to a bunch of sites of unknown trustworthiness

Couldn't agree more. These days i rarely search outside of a few sites because it's a chore to determine if a blog/site is meaningfully real, or if it's just SEO spam copied from something else. If i'm searching for a product i rarely leave `site:reddit.com` for this exact reason.

It would definitely be nice to "go to sites" again but these days i just don't.

Ironically, If AI mitigates me having to filter out SEO spam myself i could actually see myself going to more random sites than i do currently. Ie if, like in Phind, a search result was deemed by "the AI" to be useful, and assuming i trust "the AI", i'm more likely to go to it rather than talk to the bot about it.

I'm not saying that AI can or should solve this problem. I'm just saying the web as it stands now is garbage to me personally and filtering out the garbage represents a significant hurdle i deal with at the moment. Anything that solves that is of interest to me.

Right, the people have spoken, but not with their money, just yet.

Last I looked ChatGPT is a loss leader, so users might love it, but the judge is still out if people are willing to pay what it actually costs to produce the experience. It seems Google is betting on an ad-supported ChatGPT experience, which seems like the natural step to keep up.

But then there's the data side to all of this. Case in point, this Google search, https://www.google.com/search?q=chatgpt+losses, awesome I got a snippet and didn't have to sift through a bunch of sites to get the $540 million figure. Great, but who fed this data to Google ? Many sites of course, and what's their incentive ? To make money through ad clicks & sign-ups or some other form, so what's their incentive going to be now if Google keeps users to themselves like ChatGPT ?

There's going to be little to no incentive for news orgs, consultants, developers, cooks, trainers, you name it, to publish the most recent story/analysis/algorithm/recipes. If the data is going be commoditized by Google/ChatGPT or whoever, they will need to feed/pay for the most recent data themselves.

Well if you think through what world this will create - it will create one where all information is available up to around 2023, then once creators and writers have gone bankrupt or just noindexed everything, less and less new data will be available to feed the LLM.

Because there's no way to get any value (money) out of creating quality content, this will either cease to exist, or it will move behind paywalls. For example, I just don't see reddit being indexable by google for long, or quora. They won't get anything out of that deal.

Funnily enough it might be too late already, since all of Reddit's content has probably been eaten by google's LLM. So again - it will only be fresh content that will be excluded from google.

But yeah, 100% agree, this is a new race to the bottom.

I really thought that Bing + OpenAI could take a slice out of Google, but this looks very competitive (based on the slick marketing video). And it's all Google's own tech unlike the Microsoft deal.

Well, DeepMind was acquired by Google. And Microsoft has made a big investment into OpenAI. Does it really matter if it is their own tech, or of its an acquisition, or if they hired people to make it?

It probably doesn't matter from a technical angle, but I speculate that Microsoft didn't properly acquire OpenAI because the former was concerned about reputational risk should ChatGPT or some other cutting-edge AI mass-product blow up in some way (and the awkward optics of "Open"AI becoming a M$ IP).

And it's pretty clear (from their own words) that regard for that risk held Google back in aggressively releasing such products.

Now that this phase is over, I expect MS to fully acquire OpenAI to better signal that they are committed to full-spectrum AI products, as Google is doing this week.

Can OpenAI even be acquired? It is a subsidiary of a nonprofit

As of today, Microsoft has released OpenAI to everyone right on bing.com. Google still hasn't released Bard to the general public on google.com.

As of today, Microsoft has GitHub copilot in VScode and a bunch of other editors. Google Companion isn't released.

If Google were capable, and wanted to respond to Microsoft robustly, I would have expected both of these to be available right now immediately after Google I/O.

Instead neither have happened. I expect Google's decline into irrelevance to continue.

Wasn't Bard released publicly yesterday? I think it requires a login, and is still labeled as experimental, but is now available to anyone.

https://bard.google.com

Edit: The comment I was replying to appears to have edited their comment to make this one no longer relevant.

I did indeed, not in response to your comment, but to clarify that 'released' means on the search engine like their competitor has done, rather than a test URL.

Not quite anyone...I get the "Bard isn't supported in your country" message when trying it.

You can tell that they’ve started using AI to generate the “people also search for” section in search results. Recently there’s been an uptick in complete nonsense like “how to cook a coffee grinder on the barbecue” and other such things that… quite frankly I have a hard time believing anyone on earth has ever searched.

Sorry about that. It was probably me.

Sometimes you just want to figure out a cheap way to make a coffee roaster and can't figure out how to frame the right keywords search to the search.

\/s

> quite frankly I have a hard time believing anyone on earth has ever searched

Having seen some search logs, from a variety of search engines...

I have no trouble believing that at all.

But often enough to be a recommendation?

If you're parroting real search queries I'd expect a minimum threshold for occurrences.

Seems unlikely, yes. I don't know how they generate the recommendations, but maybe some form of user grouping? Combined with whatever you actually searched for, you could fall into a tiny bucket indeed.

A minimum threshold should eliminate that, yes. The fact you got it anyway suggests that there isn't one, or else... people really are trying to cook coffee on their barbeque a lot more than you'd expect.

The full keynote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNfINi5CNbY

And a 10-minutes version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpBTM0GO6xI

Is it worth watching? What is worth watching?

I suggest watching the 10-minutes version, and then the relevant portion of the long one if something piqued your interest

This video is incredibly annoying but this is the first change that's made me excited about google search for years

AI will now be generating advertisements on the fly. That's how Google works. This is basically start of a new era of marketing/advertising.

Google feels like a stereotypical popular girl in high school. Google is well-liked and good at a myriad of things. Out of the blue, a charming new transfer student arrives, impressing everyone with her exceptional dancing prowess. Google, feeling a threat to her popularity, boldly asserts, "I'm the best dancer! I've been doing this for years! I'm popular, good-looking, and the best at everything." She then devotes weeks to choreographing a dance routine, which, while decent, doesn't quite measure up to the newcomer's flair.

I would ditch the button to ask for a follow up question and always show the input field for the follow up question, Bing style. It looks like an unnecessary step.

The cheesy, white-culture, corporate "comedy" of Google and Facebook over the years straddles the cringeworthy and sad. I wish they could just showcase the technology with some upbeat music and let the tech speak for itself. All these snarky people make me hate their product more. I now want to use ChatGPT more just to spite them.

> The cheesy, white-culture, corporate "comedy" of Google and Facebook over the years...

White-culture? I'm really not sure how you can come to such a conclusion based on the video posted.

> I wish they could just showcase the technology with some upbeat music and let the tech speak for itself.

That's most of the video already. Although I admit there is a ton of bolded text statements popping up that I'm not a fan of...

Woke people always come to that conclusion.

Yes, white culture. Black people don't find that kind of stuff funny or cute. Middle Easterners don't. Most Europeans don't. Africans don't. South Americans don't. Asians don't. Some out-of-touch, white Americans do. That's the target audience, I suppose. It's snarky and hollow.

it's not necessarily the target audience, but it's who's making these videos generally — mainstream american culture has always had a major yuppie component as a primary feature, google has embodied this for quite some time

All white people aren't upper middle class coastal people. There are also additionally upper middle class coastal people that are black and middle eastern and like upbeat tech videos. Begone with your racism.

I thought it was interesting to see how they are presenting it to a general audience. So far AI search tools feel geared towards “serious questions”, you have to choose to go out of your way to use them. I thought it was interesting to see how they are spinning it to become more of an active technology

Not cool being openly racist here no matter your views.

All promises, no delivery

Google is very uninspiring right now

Just playing catch up

Lost the lead and now missing the train in their own field

A search engine short-circuiting organic traffic to sites it crawls to this extent seems like playing with fire when you've got a 90%+ market share and are already in the government's headlights.

This is another addition to a whole slew of tech / "hip "marketing videos inspired by the format of Apple's "iPhone 7 event in 108 seconds - Don't Blink" ad. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jk6sz25OZgw&pp

I think the original was pretty interesting and worked in context, but doesn't work for every product.

The contrast in quality between what you've linked and Google's is staggering. I actually did not blink while watching this video and felt totally engaged. The information was presented at a great pace and was easily digestible.

It was largely one word at a time, supported by a simple but effective visual. The Google one is just filled with text, so I had to pause repeatedly to figure out what it even was. They’re not comparable.

First thoughts on watching:

- Content in the video is moving pretty quickly. I need to pause the video to take a look at what's being shown.

- "Generative AI is experimental" and "Generative AI may be inaccurate or offensive" is the first text I see at the top of Google Search?

- That's a lot of AI generated content - the entire above-the-fold area is consumed. Does this negatively impact Google's ad revenue by usurping its visibility with their own generated content?

- No AI generated imagery - all images shown are links to embeddings on websites. This seems fine.

- "what planet is most similar to earth" gets multiple answers, but they all seem reasonable and helpful for exploring. A little odd that the first paragraph prominently talks about Mars/Venus, but all the supporting links diverge to planets outside of our solar system. I would think the supporting imagery would be for Mars/Venus. Not necessarily opposed to this, though, as query didn't say "in our solar system" and I'm down to explore more content.

- "plants for a dark dorm room" response has some weird responses. Third result says "Lucky Bamboo" and the blurb says "can handle bright or moderate light" which isn't comforting when I'm asking about darkness.

- I can't see the full query for the poem. It reads "write me a poem about my mischievous cat named whiskers using at least ..." which is unfortunate. The poem looks sane enough, but reads more like prose. When I reflect on the content being written... it's weird, right? "with whiskers so long and fluffy" -- what? Whiskers aren't fluffy. My cat named whiskers is fluffy. Unclear if the last three sentences are part of the poem and just formatted without bullet points or what happened there.

- "dress for an outdoor wedding in miami in may in a trending color with 2-day delivery" didn't appear to draw information from a weather forecast (says "typical weather"), would be nice to get a warning if it's going to rain etc. Response seemed to reference "bold colors" and "trending silhouettes" when query was for trending colors not trending fashion styles, but maybe bold colors are trending.

- why did asking follow up question "what about shoes?" show a YouTube video when I was interested in 2-day shopping selections? Was that information preserved and just not highlighted here? It's fine if so - I think cutting to a video was more impactful from a marketing perspective, but less helpful in terms of showcasing search abilities.

- "compare two lunch spots near me that are good for big groups" looks like a rock solid answer, nice.

- Using Google Search for commands like "make me a training plan for a 10k" feels foreign to me. It will take some getting used to if I'm going to repurpose Google Search for commands not just questions. Note that the response says "..if you have just started running" but that wasn't part of the request. Seems fine to assume, but not sure why it was needed.

- The energetic audio, fast moving content, beat pause that goes into "yes yes yes" about shoes all makes me feel like I am a bit older than their target audience (I'm 33) and/or that this content is missing the mark on how trendy and cool it thinks it is. Same goes for "is a hotdog a sandwich" -- that went viral like half a decade ago? Don't get me wrong, I loved pitching that question to people. It was my go-to icebreaker for a good year, but that time has passed for me.

Overall, I didn't see anything obviously wrong or explicitly embarrassing for Google, but I did not resonate with their attempt to portray themselves as hip/cool. I would've preferred a more cool/calm/collected/professional/"adult in the room" vibe that slowly showcased the overwhelming dominance of their AI abilities.

>That's a lot of AI generated content - the entire above-the-fold area is consumed. Does this negatively impact Google's ad revenue by usurping its visibility with their own generated content?

It has to! I only use Google if ddg is failing me but I don’t even start with DDG to answer questions anymore.

I ask chatgpt. Search engines are competing with free and zero ads.

The only benefit here is media tie ins, which are big but lacking custom generated stuff is probably the next big thing here.

Just an FYI - the "is a hotdog a sandwich" part is actually from a super popular podcast called exactly that (in that the people giving the "answer" and arguing are the hosts of the show). They go into tons of other topics. I assume this is more just showing off some popular people rather than being an actual answer.

Oh cool, thanks for the heads up. I didn't know that :)

Now we wait: Will Google deliver an experience like that in the video, or will this be like the many glossy announcements which over-promised/under-delivered.

This video is way too self conscious.

I find it fascinating that the top two comments (at the moment) are essentially saying "this marketing video is great" and "this marketing video is terrible". Would it be this polarizing if it wasn't Google?

Yeah, its pretty hard to watch.

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