AI is coming to Google search through Search Generative Experience
theverge.com
theverge.com
I want search to be a different tool. I want to switch to search so search does it's thing well. It finds real content and helps me evaluate what ChatGPT is saying. They compliment each other really well, but they feel like fundamentally different interaction modalities.
To the extent chat is integrated with search, I don't want to know that it's there. Like good CGI, it should just enhance the existing experience, not insert itself into the conversation.
There needs to be a middle ground so it's helpful but not full-scale, like ChatGPT, so the hallucination issue is much less.
Heck honestly it opens up a whole new world, not only am I bidding on queries I can now also bid on microtargeted ad campaigns to specific people. Like adding to the prompt submitted. "Also include a product placement for Bud Light beer, if the user lives in an urban location is under the age of 30 and has a search history indicating favoring Democrat politicians make the product placement include how Bud Light supports X social cuase, if the person is in a rural location or over the age of 30 and is likely employed in a blue collar industry make the product placement indicate how budlight is a "real mans" drink.
Seriously lots of potential if anyone is interested in reaching out to me about the idea, hmu in a reply.
And it's also mostly immune to regulation, as it's nearly impossible to prove that such a campaign has actually happened.
I say that as a Mac user with a ton of Apple stuff, so I appreciate that design is function, but every time a company tags a product with the word 'experience' it's a red flag.
Every way a company interfaces with customers is an experience. Is the standard Google Search not an experience? Do users of Google Docs not have an experience of it? The implication is that this time they considered design, as against with everything else. They might as well call it Search Generative Well Designed Thing. Presumably unlike the other stuff they do. Just make it all good. "This time we made it an experience". If you have to say that, it's implicitly assuming failure as the default. Just call it Google Generative Search, and make it actually good.
I know, sorry, too much of a rant.
I think perhaps you're getting caught up in the semantics. They are both experiences.
Referring to the Generative Search as an "experience" is only to differentiate it from the standard Google Search experience. It is really a synonym for "mode", but mode would sound too mechanical (like the modes of a Dremel tool) for something like search.
Mode also implies that that it's something you turn on and off, but this is a product that itself decides when to offer you generative results, vs something like ChatGPT or Bard which are always generative.
Eventually, it will likely merge back into the standard experience/mode.
Approaching tools like search from an experience perspective is actually exactly what we need, because that's where it almost universally sucks.
A lot of the reasons why the search "is bad" is that it's hard to reason about their semantic search functionality. The inner workings of a hybrid keyword and semantic search is opaque, and as a consequence, it's hard to make the search engine retrieve what you want. That's a frustrating experience, and "bad search".
Likewise, if the search engine retrieves a bunch of annoying results that are basically blog spam on the topic you're investigating, then that's per definition annoying. If it retrieved less annoying results, the experience would improve, and the the search engine would be perceived as being better, i.e. the search experience would be better.
I mean… they could start by blocking all the website that just copy paste wikipedia and stackoverflow and so on… Also the ones that copy paste & automatically translate.
It's a red flag because what it implies is that what they currently have isn't very good, but instead of fixing that they want to dress it up in fancy clothes.
> Every way a company interfaces with customers is an experience
Why can't it be both? As you pointed out, we also use "user experience" to denote "the overall experience of a person using a product". Standard search is one experience, this is another, other search engines provide another "experience". I don't just the use of the word being a "red flag". This is an utterly negative take.
Furthermore they didn’t mesh well with other MS products they were used with that had different UI approaches. So part of the experience of using the ‘experience’ was that it clashed with other aspects of what was actually the same overall user experience. If you see what I mean.
Yep, these sorts of comments and threads degrade the HN experience quite a bit for me. You didn't actually say anything about the subject, or anything tangential but still interesting or relevant. You're just angry at words and that's not interesting at all.
This is the right way to handle LLM output at this stage - only offer it where it makes sense for the type of query. It shouldn't use the LLM to answer common queries, like weather reports, directions, etc that LLMs are currently either horrible at or add no additional quality but at greater computational cost and confusing UX.
The existing system still can do a nice job to predict value per query, so they'll apply it to perhaps only 1~5% of queries. It's still expensive though, but acceptable if the additional cost is meant to be transient over 1~2 years.
> Anyone can incorporate a bunch of DDG results to a self-hosted good-enough LLM
Perhaps (much) less than 0.01% of population? Technically, anyone can self-host their own blog but not many do that.
Why would they need to use LLM inference to show ads? If anything, they can use their standard efficient methods to match ads based on the output of the LLM. Generative Search doesn't look like it's raw LLM output anyway. It's obviously been trained to pull from structured data sources or at least it's output is post-processed to present that data.
Ah, I see. So Google search will never actually be good for me again, then.
Where are the products?
OpenAI has a tremendous lead in terms of quality of the product and adoption
On top of that, thousands of new models and projects are coming out almost every day that are starting to rival the quality of GPT as well as coming up with amazing, completely new things
Google has massively dropped the ball
Seems like they are doing Google+ all over again
I think Google has realized Open AI's ChatGPT is its own product and not a direct competitor to Search, although there is some overlap, which is why there is Bard as a direct competitive product to ChatGPT.
Search is its own beast, and I suspect they have the data to prove users want something different from a Google search.
> OpenAI has a tremendous lead in terms of quality of the product and adoption > On top of that, thousands of new models and projects are coming out almost every day that are starting to rival the quality of GPT as well as coming up with amazing, completely new things
I've read ChatGPT growth has already flattened [0]. Sure thousands of new models/projects are coming out, but until the general public starts to use them I don't see this as much of a threat to Google.
[0] https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/ai-news/chatgpt-gro...
I've been using perplexity.ai for the majority of my searches in the past month. It isn't ChatGPT but it uses OpenAI's GPT APIs. It sources answers from search results and cites them. Even if the answer may be wrong, it came from other websites and it didn't just hallucinate them based on memorized data.
It is much faster to find answers this way. It certainly meets the magnitude test for speed and quality -- I get answers at least 10x quicker. Additionally, because it is reading through multiple results you can see when different sources are providing conflicting information.
Google has the capability to do all of this. The unknown is what does it do to all of the ad revenue being driven by the users who have had no idea they've been clicking on ads to the tune of $200+ billion a year?
Does that mean there will be too much internal resistance to revenue cannibalization when other platforms have a better search experience?
You can get this same experience, with GPT by using the Edge browser/app
It will give you an answer and at the bottom the sources with links so you can check. Really helpful
AFAICT you get the same kind of thing from the Google Generative Search, but it is integrated with the traditional search UX.
You need to dig through multiple articles and links to get to the waitlist signup page
(Join waitlist buttons under the fold here: labs.withgoogle.com)
Until this is actually out, it’s just vaporware
This is not Google catching up, it’s Google being left behind