Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

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Consider Google's search results page (setting aside the ads and dark patterns for a moment) as a form of generative UI.

You enter a term, and depending on what you entered, you get a very different UI.

"best sled for toddler" -> search modifiers (wood, under $20, toboggan, etc.), search options, pictures of sleds for sale from different retailers, related products, and reviews.

"what's a toboggan" -> AI overview, Wikipedia summary, People Also Ask section, and a block of short videos on toboggans.

"directions to mt. trashmore" -> customized map of my current location to Mt. Trashmore (my local sledding hill)

Google has spent an immense amount of time and effort identifying the underlying intent behind all kinds of different searches and shows very different "UI" for each in a way makes a very fluid kind of sense to users.

Okay. They all suck. I want a list of websites that are likely to refer to my search query. Google is terrible at understanding my intent and even more terrible at displaying information in such a way as to facilitate my task.

As an example: I was searching for an item to purchase earlier. It's a very particular design; I already know that it's going to send me a bunch of slightly-wrong knockoffs. The first thing I want to see is all of the images that are labeled like my query, as many as possible at once, so that I can pick through them. Instead, it shows me the shopping UI, which fills the screen with pricing and other information for a bunch of things that I'm definitely not going to buy, because they're not what I'm looking for. Old Google would have had the images tab in a predictable place; I'd be on it without even thinking. Now? Yet another frustrating micro-experience with Nu-gle.

I totally agree with this, and I'd go even further.

When I'm having trouble with software, I often turn to Google to figure out how to use it. I'm then directed to a YouTube video, help article, or blog post with instructions.

My take is that people are already accustomed to this question-and-answer model. They're just not used to finding it within the application itself.

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