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Comment by LetsGetTechnicl | Hacker News Reader

"AI Mode" usage is up month over month. Almost like because they forced it upon everyone. Once again, is there any real AI demand?

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Only speaking for myself, but I use it a lot, and intentionally. Enough that I set up a search engine shortcut for it in my browser (g <space> type prompt here <enter>).

I much prefer it to having to click through links to find things. My last handful of searches were:

- Looking up open hours for a local store

- Defining words

- "postgres select where string has prefix"

- "cloudformation read parameter from ssm"

Things where I want to look up a fact, but want an answer right away without having to read through multiple pages.

That's crazy. Those AI overviews consistently tell me wrong information.

I agree, the AI overview is definitely worse. I'm talking specifically about the AI mode search (at https://www.google.com/search?udm=50&aep=11). The AI overview seems to be summarizing the search results that were returned for your query already, while AI mode seems like it's doing its own searches based on your query.

I would definitely give it a shot if you haven't tried it before.

I just gave it a shot and it hallucinated an off-trail, alpine scrambling route that, based on my knowledge of the area, would potentially get someone killed. I simply asked it if it could "talk to me about X route", and then it decided to make shit up instead of just regurgitating the information in the sources it cited.

It hallucinated how long a scree slope was, made up the existence of a "high rocky knoll", and insisted someone could traverse via a heather slope that's actually non-existent.

I've used it for live service video games, it's pretty good at summarizing major changes to a game since you've played it last. With regular web search you'd have to go to every major patch and a lot of games don't even have good patch notes / it's all stuck in content creator videos.

Though I still prefer Claude for this since it's better at citing sources.

Yeah I actually use AI mode a fair bit. It has access to Google's index so it can be quite a good search engine interface when the normal one doesn't work (which is quite often).

I've accidentally clicked ai mode probably 3+ times a week recently, so that's some real good metrics ;)

Not surprising. It’s placed exactly where the regular search results used to be (when navigating away from image results) and muscle memory is strong. Haven’t clicked it intentionally once though.

For many queries, if I don't get an AI Mode response, I formulate it again until I do.

You can go straight to Gemini for that. In general it'll get a better response than AI mode too (which I think tends to use flash or flash lite).

You know there's a button right there?

Judging by global RAM, storage, and compute hardware demand, yes there is.

Yeah I mean Big Tech are using a lot of it because they're training models and shoving AI into everything. But if they weren't forcing it upon people, would that same demand be there?

I lean AI-skeptic, but I don’t think the majority of the around 1 billion weekly active ChatGPT users are being forced to use it.

At the moment, I end up using AI mode only because the ads are not as prominent as the normal search.

Indeed. Don't worry, ads will be back, just give it some time /s

Do you use an adblocker? Google also added a "Web" filter that removes all the AI slop and you can create a link to it: https://udm14.com/

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