AI Has Made Google Search So Bad People Are Moving to TikTok and Reddit

Yup, just like Boeing ditched the leadership steeped in engineering for leadership steeped in Excel.

This might be something of a technicality but I doubt it was their marketing team who is at fault. If it’s over-monetization of search results that you have a problem with as I do, it’s more likely to have been product leaders with aggressive monetization targets.

Who said it’s not. I’m trying to go in that direction

zeal is a good app for local documentation in times of no internet. it's not very good if you're not just looking up something you know the name of, though

There's no reason why people are down voting your comment. Excellent software like Dash makes finding code documentation offline easy. You'll still need online search for things you're not regularly looking up, but offline resources would save a lot of time for people who habitually put everything into Google.

Solving complex problems often means piecing together parts of a research to obtain an understanding of the issue. This any AI can't do. Chatbots are ok for trivial stuff.

I still use (duck duck go) search and ofc documentation to find what I need - in my kind of field (c++) AIs are terrible because the problems are pretty much never trivial.

Its not a dead product just because companies are selling you a solution that works better for you - it becomes a dead product once there is a better solution nearly everyone uses.

What do you use for a ComfyUI config?

I got out of imagegen a while ago but it does seem pretty advanced compared to AUTOMATIC's original UI (and cloud imagegen is just derivative and inflexible..)

I see this sentiment a lot on here, always with a vague intimation that it's a widespread thing. But it is just so far out of sync with the way I use search I just can't wrap my head around it.

You say 90% of you usage, but then describe the sorts of things that make up only a tiny fraction of mine. 90% of mine, maybe more, is just very quickly looking up basic facts. Was this the same actress from that other show? How many Xs to a Y? What was the exact wording of that quote and who said it? Where's that one store? I do this, I dunno, probably dozens? of times a day.

Are you saying you use it for that kind of purpose? I don't think I would trust any LLM's answers to those kinds of questions -- at least, not to exclusively handle all of them, on an ongoing basis. Even if it's only making up bullshit 5% of the time, after long enough that means I have no idea which 5% of my knowledge is wrong. Unless I'm double checking the information elsewhere, in which case what's the point?

Meanwhile Google still supplies the right answer for those simple, basic facts immediately like 99% of the time. A lot of the time right there in a snippet where I also instantly know the attribution. Even if we perfectly solved hallucination, the friction to get it from one of these chatbots is still so much higher. Harder to get to, so much slower.

What kind of searches are you doing on TikTok?

Yet it wasn't that bad, all they had to do is use machine learning for obvious clones and malware detection.

I was going to say on any HN thread about Google search the top comments are usually that it's all broken but it seems to work mostly fine for my purposes. OK it's not perfect but nothing is. Also if it's broken why does it have 90%+ share? I occasionally try other ones and they are worse in some ways. Even the sainted Kagi - I wanted to know something trivial and it wouldn't tell me without creating an account with name and email so I thought sod that and googled it.

It actually has some remarkably good features that it didn't in the early days. If you are looking for a physical place you can get reviews of it, a street view of the outside, travel directions and so on pretty easily.

I can recall being thwarted once in the last year or so when I was trying to figure what brand of tooth fillings I'd had and the search was filled with general dental info rather than filling brands which is more of a dental trade thing. ChatGPT was way better on that (was sonicfill). Apart from that mostly good.

Its not gone, because there is no much stronger replacement yet.

SEO was/is a good thing because it made search a lot better for many years. The real problem are the individuals gaming/abusing the hell out of the system. Add AI content to the mix and I do fear it's a problem that can't be sorted out by Google Search, at least as how we know it now.

It still has its uses and I personally still turn to it (well DuckDuckGo usually) to find specific things. But like all things, it's one tool that serves a certain purpose.

Exactly. There's been a lot of easy to identify trash on Google for a very long time that they haven't bothered to deal with. I bet it's partly because they rely too much on metrics. "Oooo lots of people clicked on the clickbait! They must want more!"

That was definitely a major factor in making things suck, but I don't think it (nor LLMs) were required for the rise of annoying content-farm sites.

Some more discussion then:

Ask HN: Why is Google search unusable lately?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39337118

Google search is losing the fight with SEO spam, study says

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39067949

Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search [pdf]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39013497