Google changes its search box
blog.google
blog.google
Websites may go back to being simply labors of love.
ChatGPT/Claude does this today. I barely click or care for the source when they already have me the info I wanted.
My speculation is all information worth anything is going to be behind some kind of wall.
Maybe I'm just #builtdifferent, but I click these a lot. Especially if I'm trying to research or make a decision on something, I want the actual source and not the potentially-fudged summary.
Not to mention the hallucinations
The situation may be even worse. Back in the labor of love era, at least webmasters could get feedback from readers. In the LLM era, readers may not even know that the site exists. Without feedback/community, the overall quality of those sites will decrease over time.
On the old internet, "know one knows that you're a dog."
On the new internet, "know one knows (for sure) that you're an AI."
In a mixed discussion consisting of both AI and human participants, AI could generate interesting discussions and recite novel-sounding statements for ongoing ones. It doesn't sound plausible to me that an avalanche of profit-driven LLMs would even post -- I would think they'd be the lurkers. My take would be that LLMs actively participating, depending on the content they post, are also labors of love by some nerd out there trying to make the best LLM.
Drain all the profit motives and rent-seeking from the web, and even something like AI joining discussions doesn't sound scary.
Similarly, if I use Gemini uses a website for an answer, it should pay something to those sites for the information it gathered. Sites would need to sign up to earn via Google, and I'd imagine there would be a certain threshold to cross to make it worth cutting checks... but that would make all these AI search tools feel much less scummy while providing site owners an incentive to keep sharing information on the internet.
Where a model like this would get messy is with sites like reddit. It's a very popular source for AI search, but the value comes from the users, not the platform itself.
The problem with all this AI/llm stuff is that end users doesn't even know your tiny site with a lot of useful information exists at all.
This depends on implementation. I primarily use Kagi for any LLM stuff. I cites pretty much everything and links out to the source. I regularly use this for search. The normal search results may not have what I need, but a line in the AI results sounds better and I click through to the source to get more context.
I find clicking through to the source is important, as I've often seen the AI get it wrong. The page has what I need on it, but the AI grabbed the wrong thing and got it backward. I'm probably in the minority, I'm guessing most people don't use LLMs like this.
- in the past Google was the entry point for everything, I was opening every single site at the top of my search and navigate through it. E.g.: if the site was a Reddit or HN post I was reading comments, following links, ecc
- today I'm using google 1 in 3 times and I mostly read the "AI Overview" section. The other 2 out of 3 I go directly into chatgtp, claude or gemini and rarely follow any links.
[0] But I see the same pattern basically in all of my colleagues, friends and relatives.
If I'm gonna lose my job, at least give me that in return
This was an interesting dilemma because it was very clear that the money was way less than the loss in ad revenue due to traffic drop, but it was also clear that if we wouldn’t take the deal, a more desperate competitor would, which would result in the same traffic loss but without the extra google money. So the company took the deal.
History repeats itself here, with the difference that instead of paying for the data, the ai crawlers simply take it for free.
In this context, if Google is going to give me the recipe without having to scroll through the story, that seems like a win to me.
The ad-revenue driven Internet of web 2.0 is finally dead and I'm not sure I'm all that sad.
It would be nice to find something better than an ad-revenue driven web, but I'm not sure this is it. We'll find out I guess...
Sure they are. I can attest that musicians will gladly publish their music even when no recompense is offered. Surely culinary artists are the same.
This is just disruption.
It’s also not disruption if your product relies on the output of the industry it kills. What will AI train on when it destroys the economics of sharing information with others?
I disagree, Google doesn't rely on a massive amount of recipe websites; they rely on Google and exploit it.
More importantly: These recipes exist from many sources, not just the website that exploited Google to be first in their rankings.
In this instance, the internet is more than top-ranking recipe websites.
Nothing kills passion faster than your only audience being an AI crawler.
Also, at some point even the ad-laden websites will die, and then Googles sources will be extinguished.
No. Temporarily it’s good for the consumer. Ultimately it is bad for the consumer, because as prices drop, so to does quality.
No because it's killing competition and becoming an even more obvious monopoly. Then at any occasion they have to choose between consumers and profits, they'll do what shareholders want and increase profits.
But then, the sites it's training on are starting to do the same thing, so maybe it won’t matter. Just last night, I pulled up four sites with “gluten free almond cake” recipes. One specified less than 1/4 the flour it would have needed, and another didn’t have any butter in the ingredients list. I had to eyeball the median and tweak from experience to actually get a bakable cake out.
Local bookshops are great, use them or lose them.
Later and you start seeing "Use this new processed wunderfood ingredient substitute!" (70s-00s)
The only solution is to find recipe books that were printed in previous decades.
Which is ironic, given that Google's entire value proposition (to users) was extracting signal from noise...
... and now it's come full A/B-advertising-optimization to being useless at that, when the need is greater than ever.
Imho, Google's greatest failing was missing how its own incentives warped creation of new web content, and failing to account for that strategically -- it turned the web into something it can't itself usefully parse.
Oh, maybe I should drive to the major city and check several bigger bookstores?
Or order it online? But that would be from the third country because this one is weirdly blind to variety. That will be €20 for a book and some €10 postage.
You're sure I can just get my recipe from the store?
And almond flour does its thing by carmelizing in combination with butter and sugar, turning your whole cake into a sort of giant macaron. You can’t pull it off without any one of those things.
Same reason its not good to have a "company town" where 1 company is the major employer to 50% of the workers.
No. It may be good for the consumer right now, but not ultimately (and on top of that, I would argue that reducing everyone to a consumer is already the wrong framing -- you need to ask what's good for the citizens). Having ten competing supermarkets with various interweaving supply lines is ultimately much better than having one giant supermarket, because that one monopolist is able to squeeze both consumers and suppliers to the detriment of both.
I'm not saying LLMs are worthless, but I'm saying if you had a magic browser add-on that simply stripped the BS out and showed you the relevant content, it would meet the use cases of the majority of people using AI (regarding search).
Said differently, Google are bringing you a solution to a problem they (largely) created.
I think it's a good tradeoff.
You’re free to block them, but the websites cloning your content won’t. So either way they’ll get the content they’re after.
Worse, when/if the time comes that LLMs source their claims they’ll refer you to the websites that cloned your content.
The search space is actually not that unhealthy. There are competitors. They just lack the reach of Google. These competitor will become increasingly useful when our personal AIs plug into them to search for the right info.
That said, I think the old internet business model is dying. Why will people write articles and pay for hosting if they can't receive any advertising revenue? I think I'm okay with this. Before advertising decimated the free internet, people ran sites for fun. Maybe we return to that.
1) because that fancy summarised results page will effectively be the ad. The results will push you towards google's partner sites or promote behavior benificial to them.
2) because partners may soon be able to pay to change the results of searches. Who won an election 20 years ago? That "fact" from the AI could depend on which answer has been sponsored by which political interest. What happened in china in 1989 ... how much money do you have?
3) the user becomes the product. No ads in search results, but our searches and online behavior tracked by them will be sold to whoever is most interested in what we do online.
All the "AI search" I've tried is far less relevant than a proper search, using search engines without it seems much faster and more relevant.
Whenever I get AI search results, its summaries lack substance, are often just plain wrong, and so on. When I check, it's often usong the wrong aggregate data to return results.
Search engines these days, traditional ones, have been hobbled by targeting the lowest common denominator. They drop search terms, alias them (eg, Joe=Joseph,Josephene, Jodiene), and thus return endless bad results.
Using "web" search on Google, for example, putting all search terms in quotes, helps enormously. If searching for Joe Baker, you don't want aliased responses.
My point is, AI is yet another abstracted layer. It not only aliases things, it halucinates, and further, it doesn't even show the context it simply summarizes.
It's the next layer of crappiness.
As a side note, there os a product in my home country called the Swiffer. It is like a broom, but uses disposable sticky paper instead of broom bristles and a scoop.
Point is, it isn't very environmentally friendly. I weirdly see environmentalists using it, instead of just a good old broom.
And now I see environmentalists using AI for search. What? Why! The sheer additional power and cost, all the new datacenters, hardware, just for what??
Even of one believes it is mildly better (which it isn't, if you use traditional search properly), are you now replacing your broom with a swiffer?!
The amount of environmentalism that goes out the window, for convenience, astonishes me.
I've had the opposite experience with Perplexity Pro. Yesterday it took just under nine minutes to deliver a detailed and accurate answer as to the nearest locations where I can buy Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses (at least 3 hours drive away FWIW) that day.
In the past several months I've spent countless hours using search engines with dismal results that weren't close to that.
The real test: dont test AI by asking it questions you already know. Ask it a proper question and then go out and find the answer yourself. That is where AI really falls down, the non-trivial stuff.
If conserving energy was important, none of these AI datacenters would be built, none of our items would be shipped across the planet from Asia. They would conserve energy and import raw materials only.
Several months ago, I was getting hallucinations and silly answers, like Jaco Pastoreous being the bass player for Metallica.
but lately it’s been great. Especially for technical syntax stuff, like asking for syntax on a jq command, or sal syntax, or something trivial like movie casts members….
Edit: I also assume there’s now some pre-processing filter to retrieve answers from a cache or something, because I’m getting pretty long answers very quickly….
For average results, that can have an acceptable answer that tends to the mean or societal mainstream views along some subject, the google answer works for me. For others, which are well unfortunately most of my queries these days, the google answer is brainwashing and propaganda. It feels little more than a continuation of the SARS-COV-2 era fact checkers which were actually failed attempts at propaganda machines for enforcing certain views as true while others were cited as "evidence does not suggest" (hand selecting the evidence of course means this is nothing more than confirmation bias).
I think the AI technology used in most LLM models is an acceleration of this- it will tout mainstream views or hand-picked views as truth while calling others false. And without an ability to search any more for opposing views, you get left with a really warped view of reality that might work for most. Though not for everyone.
>Google parent Alphabet profit jumps 81% in Big Tech earnings roundup
https://www.euronews.com/business/2026/04/30/google-parent-a...
TL;DR: Google is heavily stuffing more and more ads into every monetizable SERP, which explains the ever-increasing revenue.
But my theory (expanded in more detail here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47957708) is that its cash cow is heavily optimized towards its current anti-competitive, multi-sided chokehold of the online ad market -- look up the AdTech Antitrust findings around manipulating ad auctions, e.g. Project Bernanke -- which relies on ad volume.
With agents however, I suspect that volume will shrink drastically even if they stuff ads at each step of the conversation. Because it's only the final click that will matter, and those ads will be meaningless.
It's not clear that Google can charge enough for that final click to compensate for the loss of both, the value of all the ads that lead to it, as well as their ad auction manipulation premium.
But! Does Musk have his robot army or not at this time? That will determine how the pitchfork mob turns out.
Let the big guys fight it out.
There is money in protecting the websites. If you host with OVH they are interested in you making money so you can pay them.
You are on top of Google search results or something? I think I am on some last page that no one will click like 2nd page of results.
The web won't die. It will just become even more commercialized than it already is. You might recognize most of the things listed.
Selling things: Restaurants, hotels, local businesses; Ads: more of the same
Work: a) Projects people collaborate on and need to share information b) Writing articles to boost a resume
And maybe sharing what people do, they do it for free, see social media.
This discussion was broached originally when discussing whether or not search engines and aggregators had any compensation obligation in respect of news articles. This was a hot topic in the IP and policy circles for a few years.
When the Canadian government attempted to create a mechanism to compensate content creators for the scraped content, there was widespread outrage from tech circles, despite the same community agreeing, across extensive policy discussions, that action had to be taken to prevent this universal man-in-the-middle value capture by search engines.
I've had fairly extensive discussion with the individuals involved in the academic, policy and internal industry analysis of the issue. Watching industry agree to address the issue, then aggressively spend to shape public narratives in public was eye opening.
The recent shift into "AI is obviously going to hoover up all your data and there's nothing you can do now that the theft is laundered through an LLM" is just the latest example of the same trend of short sighted capital-over-everything decision making we've become used to in jurisdictions that have dysfunctional legislatures.
Mention
Mechanisms might exist to make you think you have one, the same way copywrite should prevent millions of books being gobbled up by TheZuck but ultimately do you really have a choice?
Rules and laws don't exists for you.
this has been done before, quite often, but toward ends morally askew.
https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetcher...
As far as I know, you don't have a choice. They have no obligation to respect your wishes, and LLMs are legally allowed to scrape & republish your content.
I have no obligation to not send all scraper-looking traffic to a black hole full of zip bombs.
Showing porn to a minor is not legal either.
Disclaimer: his website is for hosting malware for "testing" purposes. Testing how well AI can't deal with it.
But fine. How about I just...don't respond to those requests at all. I have no obligation to send them data period.
AI summarization has already causes issues for sites like rtings where people are no longer visiting the site but still making use of the data presented there. Leading to rtings not getting enough traffic to continue to post their data.
It is an existential crisis for websites and when they go away it'll be an existential crisis for AI.
What about the stories of marketing managers who learned months after the fact that their credit card had expired and their google ad spend had ceased with no affect on traffic? Google isn't always an effective promotional vehicle.
I have seen this happen first hand at a Fortune 100. They didn't track shit.
I may be strange and unusual, but I just have never cared about my Google ranking. I know this makes me out of the ordinary among site owners but I have been humming along fine.
This certainly will disrupt traffic but for some of my sites I honestly think this is a good thing. I want you to want to be there, not just stumble upon my site because you happen to hit the right search keyword. Plus if it gets bad, this does create a new opportunity for others with cross linking and search.
My target market is more technical then that so likely, nothing would change for me. Again, I recognize the impact of Google's dominance for some, but if the "attestation" isn't helpful and only hinders using services that people have come to rely on, there will be push back.
I also have been advocating for years for everyone in my circle to avoid using Chrome. A homogenized browser market is a risk, and Chrome is the new IE. I hope you are also a part of the effort to advocate for browser diversity.
They are already training people to click these away.
Do you depend on site visitors for making a living? That's what this is about.
I know that sites relying on ad income will and are being hurt tremendously by this effort on Google's part. However, if you are in the startup space and make money on services you offer, search should be one of several strategies you are deploying for user growth.
But that's why you're a nobody instead of a million dollar startup founder. You didn't play the game, so, you lost. I lost too.
And here I thought denying ad revenue to websites was the morally superior way to navigate the web...
Step 2, Google extinguishes the web and nobody has a reason to publish content, consumers lament but are trapped, Google has created a platform to serve content instead of links
Step 3 (or maybe 2a), Google is now monetizing their content machine
Step 4, Google offers people a way to contribute to the content machine, make some $$ per N views, whatever. People create content within the ecosystem
Step 5, Google is now the internet, more content is created overall, quality is lower overall perhaps, algorithmic echo chambers flourish even more than today, old heads on HN lament, everyone else just goes on living
There's no real mainstream way outside of youtube to make meaningful money with free video content.
But yes, interesting thought which does kind of make sense. The marketplace-ification of the textual web.
Imagine people would go to youtube and watch previews of your videos solely; or the preview is your video, but condensed and given preferential treatment.
I'm aware. And I'm curious how that will play out. Because same as with Youtube, historically Google Search gave the means and the discoverability to monetize producing valuable free content.
Youtube is directly dependent on people producing free content. If Youtube wouldn't pay its creators as well as it does, it would simply die.
Same with Google Search. Good content and good SEO gives the means for websites with free content to survive. Google usually takes a cut on ad placement on those pages with AdSense.
If Google Search now doesn't pay content creators as well as it used to, what will happen to free content on the web? It's bad for Google and it's bad for the creators.
We will see.
Still, it's all very centralized platforms, which historically isn't the case for all the monetized free content you usually get from google search (reviews, recipes, travel guides, converter sites etc. etc.)
Isn't Stack Exchange the emblematic case?
this kills the entire internet vibe of the 90s, early 2k
FTFY: "couple of decades since has become". The vibes of passion-driven 1990s started to be overwhelmed by the din of money right when the Internet has become a major commerce venue, some time in early 2000s.
(It doesn't work for ad-funded writing, but while I have substantial sympathy there this has historically been an unpopular argument on HN)
More broadly, I love it when an author I trust in one area writes about other topics.
This also could have been fine, it can bring back authenticity however for this to happen no one should be making money from it. Instead, only megacorps make money and they can just ignore your ideas and generate theirs. They control the distribution and the supply now.
My income isn’t ads, just getting a cut of the sale on the complex products I help you buy. Even that sort of curation takes time and effort.
Even for all the things I do for free without any revenue whatsoever - most of it, really - I do want to feel some recognition. I don’t want the interaction to be mediated by an advertising company.
If your site is about your product, Google won't be able to serve the sign-up page from AI; the traffic would come your way. Same for a site that sell something: the traffic you're interested in would arrive at your checkout page.
Paid-content sites and ad-supported sites are screwed though, on top of their being screwed by archive.is and ad blockers.
That is not what "free mirror" is. Like, that is not the same thing at all.
Site traffic
(Torment Nexus rules apply here)
Google has always crawled your site and been an arse! Now you get to decide whether they are hallucinating!
You can drop pointers on Masto and other socials to your sites - that has not changed.
Do we need something else? ie you drop a link to somewhere else.
If instead the purpose of your website is to manipulate users for financial gain (for instance by showing media attempting to manipulate their purchasing decisions, after receiving a bribe from a vendor), and the information is just a way to lure users, then maybe this malicious business model will finally be no longer possible.
On the other hand, Google played a big role in creating this problem in the first place. The search results have trended downwards towards this kind of SEO slop for the last 10 years and Google has been unable (or unwilling) to fix it. Plus, the AI results Google shows are not free from commercial influence and will probably only get worse in this regard. Except now this money will flow to Google instead of $random_internet_spammer. I don't know if that's any better.
The idea that Google won't eventually "manipulate users for financial gain" with Gemini is comically naive. That's how they're going to make money from this thing.
It's the news media that will suffer the most.
Making the information available that you put up your site for?
The counter argument is that sites are becoming more AI slop or may intentionally provide poison they don’t want to train on. There may be a cut off date after which training must be carefully curated; and the main body of data has already been collected.
Sites may still get traffic from agents searching for current information. Maybe even the resurgence of RSS? One can dream.
In that case, the consequence will be that people will stop having webs. It is already happening with personal and niche sites.
Websites will die on the vine if LLMs intermediate all the content.
The "website" of the future will be an API optimized for LLM crawlers, serving plain-text content that no end-user will ever view directly. The SEO game will change to LLMAO.
The current zeitgeist of them will, but I think not all.
My first website (GeoCities) was either before Google existed or very close to it. Connected to people via WebRings and directory listings. More recently, RSS feeds.
That sounds like an unalloyed plus. The perverse incentives caused by advertising have been the biggest driver of the web's decline, IMO.
[1]: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-search/?license=fr...
[2]: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-search/?license=co...
https://www.epceurope.eu/post/epc-welcomes-landmark-cjeu-rul...
My appeal is just to realize that our implicit assumption that we can't do anything ever at all besides appealing to completely ineffectual individual action is in and of itself a strongly ideological and politically radical position to take.
That also requires new ways to think about how you sell content online. Mass syndication has been very successful for music and video content, and much more.
- It assumes google should be the arbiter who gets paid.
- It assumes the only damage here is financial.
We have more than enough of these misguided schemes that just enrich small interest groups while inconveniencing everyone.
Incorrect legal advice, incorrect critical statistics or incorrect compliance information.
Make it a genuine liability to rely on the AI summaries.
1) Sites will have mcp / APIs for LLMs. So that when I ask my AI Agent du jour. It can call any of the sites where I have subscriptions for information.
2) Sites that are passion projects will be harvested by our LLM overlords.
3) Sites that people don't type into their web browser and need ad revenue will die.
4) SEO will finally die.On the contrary, it will flourish. It’s just that it’ll shift to whatever can trick LLMs into recommending your product.
https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt...
I recently search for some generic home appliance term and google's AI Overview blurb ended with "For more information about repairing home devices check samsung.com" (non clickable)
I am sure SEO companies will claim they can make that happen on purpose, and people will pay them for that.
Opened ChatGPT, photographed the machine because I didn't know concrete model, he saw the error code. I told that it also leaked prior to today and it just said: clean the filter.
Did it, and now it continues to work :)
Another bullet point: Father has older Audi, Battery drains fast. Some mechanic said him to check comfort control module - usually does that for those older cars.
While I was measuring how much Amps battery draws and let ChatGPT know what I'm doing, he also tells me the same stuff mechanic did. I hope that mechanic wasn't using ChatGPT :) Anyways, there was no current leak after ripping out comfort control module.
This will happen especially with things like conspiracy theories because the choice might be to pollute the output or share the general consensus. Like searches for Apollo landing conspiracy theories can either chose to present “alternate facts” so that people can “do their own research” and conclude it is fake or LLM auto corrects to “Apollo landing happened”.
Newsletters have been around forever and never taken off like the open web and free blogging have. Slapping a Stripe integration on the backend hasn't led to Substack becoming a sustainable business not propped up by VC cash.
We had internet before we had browsers, then the browser took over as the main method of consuming the internet. It has a lot of problems and e.g. mobile apps are trying to fill the void, but they have their own problems. Next stage is the personal assistant agent, which will be the single entry point to the internet.
But I would guess that the agents would already know their handlers well enough to answer for them.
Which will then get summarized for others by their agents.
Real human discussions will be gold going forward. HN should be paying us actually.
* A large fraction of people are realizing that some search engines are soft-censoring, already; * Another fraction of people will not accept AI agent slop as a replacement for website search; * Another fraction of users will get annoyed/tired with not getting directed anywhere; * Another fraction of users does not rely on AI-focused/AI-exclusive search engine.
Between the lot of those, the non-Google-covered Internet has, and will, live on. Yes, with _less_ traffic - nto _no_ traffic.
> Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from the University of Chicago.
His hot takes are best ignored, is just convenient click bait for their entire negativity angle.
I spent 9 years of my life putting hard-earned information on the internet, and now big tech uses it to enrich themselves while putting me out of work. Even my backup plan - software development - is being devalued to hell. It's so damn depressing. We'll get the internet that we deserve.
But I forgot that they convinced you to accept AI as a magic "make copyright disappear"-technology.
Google users wanted to find that info. Google served its users.
They keep innovating even if it means cannabilizing their main revenue stream. Which increases the chances that you will not still be stuck producing film emulsions while everyone else is slowly making bank doing digital.
I think if you look through this thread you’ll see a lot of skepticism of the AI results, and I think that is a fairly broadly held opinion. The obvious way to check the AI answer is to click through to some sources.
I think for Google to stop sending me traffic, it would have to be essentially perfect at AI answers. It will never get there, especially as so many searches are opinion-based like “what is the best mobile phone right now.”
In the future I don't even use Google but my bot does
Why would I want to be restricted to google’s “view” of the info
The difference is where once they scraped, wrote a summary and invited users to go to the site, now they just provide the summary.
But I do agree it will be or already is a paradigm shift. And a painful one.
From that article:
> There’s a theory I’ve had for a long time that I’ve been calling “Google Zero” [...] Regular Decoder listeners have heard me talk a lot about Google Zero in the last year or two.
But the point here is not that he predicted it first, it's that he coined a term for it and has been extensively covering it.
Even though the result is often good and combines information from multiple sources, it can also get things wrong by combining information from different eras or just plain outdated advice. AFAICT, without primary sources, the result is for entertainment purposes only.
Type your question in Android/Chrome search bar:
"Is …?"
AI Overview on the search results page:
"No…"
Click through to the AI mode tab/"Dive deeper with AI" CTA:
"Yes…"
Sorry, no, I hate that.
Sometimes that is fine, sometimes it is not
I've got a pretty solid algorithm for checking correctness: I ask the LLM for its sources, I try to find 3-5 independent ones (that are not just copying each others' answers), and if they all agree, that's very likely to be the correct answer. Simple math here: if you have 5 sources and they are each 60% likely to be correct, then an LLM choosing at random from them would have a 60% success rate, while someone checking all 5 of them for agreement would have a 1 - (0.4^5) = 99% chance of being correct. It's a good algorithm for doing other things like verifying scientific papers, too: you look for indendent research groups that have all reproduced the same findings.
I did the same thing with ten-blue-links websearch as well, and hope this would be the habit of anyone else too. (Although I know it wasn't, because I worked on Google websearch 15 years ago, on a project to increase the credibility of search results, and we did cafeteria UX studies about "What makes a credible result?" and everybody said "Because it appears as the top result on Google.")
Say I want to look up some game from my childhood, which I barely remember any details for. Going to google and trying is likely going to be very difficult unless I happen to get lucky with some key element. But if an LLM can get it right even a minority of the time, it can lead to me quickly finding the game I'm looking for.
This does depend upon the ability to evaluate the answer, like checking against source or some other option where you know a good answer from bad. If you can't, then it does become much more dangerous. Perhaps part of the reason AI seem to empower experts more than novices in some domains?
Please don't ever go into aerospace. Or healthcare. Or engineering. Or pretty much anything that actually matters.
Agentic AI has its faults, but one thing I've found it to be very good at is surfacing the "unknown unknowns": things I didn't know I should have searched for but that are directly relevant to my problem.
The other bots either make up links or simply don't provide any information that is distinguishable from the LLM predictive output.
Ironically Gemini is also very bad at this, while it should have been the best at Web search.
Gemini also does something very patchy, which is to provide "links" which are in fact GET queries into classic Google search. I'm guessing they did it this way because the links generated/hallucinated by the LLM were too unreliable.
I worry that the LLMs are just the equivalent of a ‘lagging indicator’ of web quality though - that they will also soon be overwhelmed with the sheer volume of plausible nonsense that is the web now, just like search engines are.
Model collapse everywhere.
Google, like most consumer product companies, designs for the majority. Citations are a niche feature for the 5-10% of users that like to do their own research. The majority just wants an answer, which has been the direction Google's gone in since Knowledge Panels and the Answer OneBox came out in 2012.
I know that deepseek has links for every chain it makes where you can read the source and it's actually a good thing to check on that.
Have you tried explicitly asking for links to primary sources?
LLMs, that can supply valid links, give me a completely different variety of results. Either I am too dumb to search manually, too impatient or google search is just broken, but Gemini usually gives me something I can work with. I just wished I could blacklist some sources like medium.
This will remove any results from there for you.
Alternatively, site:news.ycombinator.com would search this website explicitly.
I've been paying for Kagi for like four years. I like it but also resent that it's something I pay for now when I remember how good Google was 20 years ago.
And therein lies the rub; for years now Google's search results have returned useless SEO garbage. For now, it definitely seems like an LLM answer is better than what was being returned and I guess this is the reason why Google ripped it out.
Google Search has been terrible for a long time. But you could still dig through it and find those primary sources. That is, in my opinion, the primary purpose of a search engine. Replacing it with what an LLM has invented based on ingesting both reliable and unreliable sources is not viable for a large category of things. The main way we can judge the reliability of something is to loo at where it comes from. If I'm looking for, say, official US job market statistics, whether I trust the numbers I find depends on whether I find them published on a US government website or on a random person's blog. A number presented to me by a chat bot would not let me judge, so it's useless.
The best a language model could possibly do, by definition, is to find websites and link them to me, letting me judge their credibility. But then it's just a worse search engine.
And you are a small minority. People go to google to get answers, not to look for articles in order to look for answers in the articles.
Job market statistics are actually probably a strong point for the AI overview. I just Googled 'us job market last month' and got an AI overview that accurately summarized a New York Times article for qualitative information ("surprisingly strong 115,000 jobs", "no-hire, no-fire"), followed by accurately summarizing the official Bureau of Labor Statistics website for raw stats, followed by some other stuff I didn't check. Not everyone would prefer The New York Times' take, but the citation prominently displays their name and logo, so you can tell what you're getting.
Weak points are when the topic is obscure enough that the AI overview conflates two different things or overgeneralizes, or trusts the wrong sources.
Imagine that you had 1,000 years to read every Google result on a particular topic, and literally infinite patience. You would read a lot of rubbish but ultimately you are a smart person, you would figure out the underlying truth and likely produce something that is more valuable than the average or even the sum of the parts.
I have seen it hallucinate things confidently but that is usually when it has no direct sources to pin down the output.
Even though the result is often coherent and confidently synthesizes information from multiple experiences, it can also hallucinate, suffer from recency bias, or accidentally merge memories from different decades. AFAICT, without access to the underlying telemetry, human responses are for entertainment purposes only.
From the past hundreds of Google searches I've done where I got an AI summary, I'd say the result is actually rarely good. At the very least 80% of the outputs contain critical mistakes, often exactly about the specific thing you're asking.
For most things I research, there is only secondary sources, reporting on an event, a trend…
There are many primary sources depending on exactly what you are looking for. Shipping/port manifests or even stats are often findable. People in the region witnessing first-hand what is happening. If you are interested in political views then people who are in charge of policy and control resources in the region. Etc etc…
If you want a summary then, yes, you want a journalist or another source that looks at primary sources and has some knowledge of the region to start with to help give context to a specific situation.
I don’t understand how you can learn anything then. News is off limits for you, history, sciences (unless you do the experiment yourself) as well. Math might be possible, at least you can check the proof yourself without having to travel anywhere. At least one can see the earth isn‘t flat by getting on a plane, but one has to squint a bit.
More seriously, to summarise, I don’t believe you live by this principle, you would live under a rock and I wouldn’t be chatting with you.
I did state, “when I’m searching for something,” which (in my view) is different than simply being curious or watching/reading the news; One does need to be careful with what news they consume.
I usually don’t search for my news.
100% agreed, it has become very difficult to stay balanced and not end up in some ideological echo chamber.
> “when I’m searching for something,” which (in my view) is different than simply being curious or watching/reading the news
yeah ok, that’s nifty. Still, one search requires traveling, meeting people to hear from their mouth the statement the book / newspaper reported about, for example. How many searches a year to you manage?
It doesn’t.
We’re often talking about something that the literature refutes, but the LLM was trained on a bunch of public content from resources such as whattoexpect.com, full of terrible parenting advice.
People didn’t bother with sources and research before, they don’t bother now, AI is just a magical thing for them.
<form method="GET" action="/search">
...
<center>
Search the web using Google!
<br>
<input type="text" name="query" value="" size="40">
<br>
<select name="num">
<option value="10" selected>10 results
<option value="30">30 results
<option value="100">100 results
</select>
<input type="submit" value="Google Search">
<input type="submit" name="sa" value="I'm feeling lucky">
<br>
<i>Index contains ~25 million pages (soon to be much bigger)</i>
</center>
...
</form>
What a nostalgic classic.
This is all new, so I may be a bit hyperbolic, but the reason OpenAI introducing ads bothers me is the implicit (or even explicit) bias that can be smuggled into a chat in ways that simply aren't possible when you're just clicking through to an external source. There are all kinds of implications to Google no longer being that source of truth, even by default. Maybe this has quietly been the case for a long time, but this feels like the final move — pushing their ad bias (i.e., whoever paid the most) into a conversational system, where dark patterns are far easier to implement and much harder to detect.
One answer to this might be domain-specific agents — narrower, accountable, ideally something you (or your community) actually run. But even then it all falls back on trust: you being a good-faith actor, and others trusting that you are one. Which is to say, we're back to the same problem, just at a smaller scale.
There was never anything bias-free about google search. It "ranks" information based on all sorts of qualities. At our most generous we can call it somewhat of a "consensus" check. Historically it was a tool for quickly getting you in the vicinity of an answer that most would consider correct.
Remember "google bombing"? Hell SEO alone invalidates any assertion that google search is a valid source of truth and that's be going on for a long time.
There is an incredible gap in the search literacy between different users of Google. Some will accept what they find in the top links, no matter how dubious the source.
Google had already transformed the open web to the point of uselessness anyway.
just becuase somebody publishes something on a website, does not make it a fact. google has always been good at finding things that look like facts, and their AI iteration is also good at that.
As I said in another comment, just look at “Google bombing.” There was a time when people would mount public campaigns to artificially drive pages to be associated with certain words, like I remember when people made it so if you search “failure” you got “George W. Bush.”
To use a different example: it would be like saying we know the quality of a car because of how many units sold. The driving force could be many unrelated factors, like the visual aesthetics, the feel, etc. which don’t tell you anything about the MPG, the upkeep, and other info most of us would consider key indicators of quality.
For a long time there was a decent correlation with the quality of the information and how far up the Google search it sat. But you are putting way too much stock in the quality of that information. It has always required heavy scrutiny.
Yes, but not because of facts or bias-free sources. It was the equivalent of staring deep at your wrist watch while someone's speaking: a clear signal that you were done with whatever they wanting to talk about.
I kinda like that "let me Google it for you" in Japan was more popular as "Google it loser" (ググレカス), a rare instance where the common phrases was more expressive than it's western counterpart.
The ad version of the web, where ~60% of people carry the ad burden for everyone, and defacto aligns the service providers with advertisers, is just a guaranteed bad outcome. The only real upside, which frankly people take for granted, is that the ad-web is classless web. Broke or rich you get the same (crappy) services.
I remember those mock web service package flyers from the net neutrality days. Where people made fake marketing material showing website packages you could access with different paid tiers, something reminiscent of the cable TV days.
Back then it was horrifying, but 20 years later, I think I would entertain a subscription to a wide array of web services if it meant they worked for me and not advertisers.
It’s one thing to say we need to pay. It’s another for ISP’s to get 3 pulls at the hose (paid for a connection, paid for what we can browse, paid for who provides the sites) when some of those elements don’t even require more (or at least much) effort or infrastructure on their part. I don’t like the idea of their picking winners and losers. We’ve got enough of that as it is.
Peering is complicated too. It means an ISP carries your site's traffic without you paying them. Is that reasonable? I'd say common sense is: yes, if the traffic is only between you and the ISP's users, since the ISP is then getting paid. But who carries the cost of setting it up? Common sense would say the site operator should pay but the ISP shouldn't inflate the cost.
What I am talking about is websites that do not pay the toll being artificially slowed down. A pillar of neutrality is that “all packets are equal.” As long as we have stable connections and are using decent services, your blog should load as fast as any major news site. Without net neutrality, ISP’s can put their thumb on the scale and make it so your blog takes 5 second, 10 seconds, whatever they want. They can throttle load times despite both of us paying for high speeds and using quality services. Think: governors in golf carts, if you’re familiar with that. Under net neutrality this is not permitted.
Links
- https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database - Internet places
- https://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-feeds - RSS feeds
- https://rumca-js.github.io/search - demo search
- https://rumca-js.github.io/feeds - demo for feeds
- https://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-top - top places
While there are times where I want pure search (Kagi, Old Google) I mostly use LLMs to search now and have them provide me links for source data.
When I do use LLMs as a search engine I always want it integrated into my AI workflows with access to tools and scripts etc. I never want to have a conversation with a website that is geared towards advertising me products.
I was once very good at advanced Google search queries but they seem to no longer respect such queries - either showing irrelevant results or none at all (that should exist).
I don’t love LLMs, but they seem to not make up stuff very often these days and usually cite links to what they summarized. Sometimes the tone of the summary is slightly wrong “algorithm X was designed for Y” (when I know it wasn’t) but it’s otherwise very close to the mark.
What does amaze me, is the LLM seems to “understand” my question with very little context — I would have to give a human many more details about goals/intent.
I know damn LLMs are not capable of thought and are just a glorified search engine, but they do it well. Perhaps all my education made me little more…
I used to mock Sci-Fi movies where characters lazily dictated questions to the computer and it gave high quality answers.
We’re living in that world now.
The vast majority of original content is now in one or another social network or on discord. News articles are an exception, though the news has its own problems. Some wikis still exist and are actively maintained, of course, but not a ton. If it's a topic that's academically studied you might find information in papers, but those have poor web visibility and are better located with specialty tools. LLMs seem to be quite good at locating papers, though.
Ah, but they are! Kagi is light years better than Google, and is a worthy replacement. You do have to pay for it, but I get my money's worth.
I've been trying to use LLMs for things and it makes mistakes all the time. Just this week i had multiple instances of various LLMs basically saying "just run the software with --flag-that-fixes-your-problem" or "edit the config and add solve-your-issue=true" hallucinating non-existant options. Even if i manually link the relevant documentation pages it will still just make basic mistakes. and if im having to read the documentation myself anyway to fix the AI's mistakes, why is the AI even in the loop.
its infecting search too, because blogspam/slop articles are managing to make their way into search results by just making up untrue information, claiming software can do things it cant, or has options that don't exist.
It's baffling that people have become so devoted to them as a source of information given how inaccurate they are. I've learned not to trust anything they say, ever, especially when it comes to technical subjects.
Though I will say I get much better results from the LLMs I pay for than the free ones with Google or DuckDuckGo, which seem to be way way way more prone to just make crap up based on your search and cite web pages that, when followed, don't have the claim being made in the AI search results at all. By contrast every "source" link I've followed in the for-money AIs has 100% backed what the AI said it backed. Don't judge by the free AIs the search engines put out, those things are probably starved of resources and are nearly useless.
(Which I did not intend as a commentary on Google's plans here, but it is a data point of interest... that pressure to cut costs on the "free" services is quite directly at odds with providing quality AI services for the forseeable future.)
And I’ve tried Google’s once or twice and seen it used once or twice, and used ChatGPT exactly once, last week, and I was not at all impressed by any of them. Their output, for what I’ve personally seen, has been nonsense, obvious, or unverifiable.
Same here. The free version probably gets orders of magnitude less of a compute budget, though, so I am not really surprised.
What I find really surprising though is how many people still have only ever used the free version of any LLM, even those that are heavy users and could easily afford it. It seems like a pretty big and basic product marketing mistake to me to limit capabilities instead of usage time in the free version! How are people supposed to learn what they'd get if they were to pay?
You can't do something like this with search.
Sure, it's pretty low-friction to do this by opening a document on most platforms,[1] but using an LLM chatbot not only automates this but provides a synopsis of the findings, and if history's any guide, lowered frictions such as this tend to be the way people tend to move.
__________________________________________
Notes:
1. Though I'll note that opening a free-form text file on mobile OSes can be stubbornly difficult, let alone actually entering text into them. Even the simple act of copying and pasting text is remarkably higher-friction than on a desktop. In many ways the Web has gone vastly backward from text-based, CLI clients where I can 1) open my whole session in a terminal multiplexer (screen, tmux), 2) fire up a text-based web browser (w3m, lynx, etc.), and 3) just wholesale grab site metadata or result summaries and dump that to a textfile. Yes, you need a keyboard to do this efficiently, but keyboards and text-manipulation are just inherently so far superior to touch-based or speech-based interfaces it's not even funny. Touch and voice are convenient, for fast, very shallow uses. But not powerful.
An increasing number of studies are indicating a reliance on "AI" leads to deleterious cognitive effects. I felt this acutely myself.
I've noticed a significant boost to my recall since shunning "AI" as much as possible.
Using google search, will return roughly infinite recipe sites. The sites were generated to spam AI generated recipes surrounded by advertisements. None of them are really any good because they were generated by a script and not looked at by a human until I come along and click. The standard is for all recipes to have at least 10-15 screenfulls of vertical spam wrapped by ads for recipe pages. The internet, at least using Search, is now useless for food recipes. I would have better, faster luck driving to the public library and looking in a physical cookbook; at least those recipes were probably tested at least once by humans unlike the advertising spam sites. Nobody has 45 minutes to watch 44 minutes of filler material surrounded by ads on Youtube either. If you want to cook food, the internet is near dead at this time, unfortunately.
AI search will plagiarize the "Original Nestle Toll House" recipe from the back of every bag of chocolate chips ever made. Its a good recipe and I've baked them many times over the decades.
I wish the internet were more useful, but the people in charge of it don't want it to be useful; here have some ragebait and doomscroll while watching the ads.
This is a wild take, as someone that cooks a lot, and largely from the internet (though I do own a lot of cookbooks)
The reality is that just googling for recipes was never good to begin with. People have been complaining about SEO spam and ads on recipe sites forever, but those recipes were always trash even before they got to the absurd state they're in now. Serious eats, bon appetit, food 52, smitten kitchen, chefsteps, all have great recipes. Some of these have paywalls, although you can get around them. Serious eats though is totally paywall free and has a pretty wide range of recipes. There are other sites for more niche cuisines.
You'll still have ads, and you'll still have a wall of text before the recipe. But the ads are slightly less obtrusive, and the wall of text on the quality sites is why those SEO techniques exist in the first place: a recipe that is just "list of ingredients + instructions" and doesn't include any context is ultimately a crapshoot. The thinking that goes into a recipe shows that you're not going to be wasting your time because it's been tested and optimized.
I don't comprehend how the average person gets any useful information out of Google.
But I still want to also be able to do my normal, old school searching.
yeah man good thing LLMs are structurally incapable of being incentivized to sell you a product or render referral links, this is surely future-proof
Yeah, they probably aren't doing (most of) these now, but it doesn't take much mental energy to extrapolate once you factor nearly every other tech company's ethical trajectory and the current geopolitical environment. Substituting classic search entirely with LLMs is not a savvy move.
A search engine could certainly tamper with which of these sources they surface/rank higher (which I suspect happening more often of late), but they're still obliged by their nature to branch out and seek information from the broader world.
LLMs, on the other hand, are self-contained opaque monoliths that can be conditioned to deceive or obfuscate with devious cleverness, and all control over their behaviors is entirely concentrated in the hands of whatever corporation trains them.
As soon as one gets annoying, expensive, advertiser heavy etc. you just rip it out and replace it with the other one. AFAICT there is zero lock-in or moat. I often am able to switch models in one click or command. This is why all the LLM providers are desperate for a product layer/comprehensive tool set.
Sure maybe they all end up that way, but there’s plenty of reasons corporate customers will want private LLM usage that is not skewed towards advertising. I am happy to pay for that.
Also, open source models are a bulwark against another search style ad Monopoly.
The advertisements fed the content, which fed the AI, which in turn feeds your AI workflows. AI is still not trusted unless it's output is grounded with sources.
My experience with AI searches is that they'll still be wrong a lot of times, but it will condense/flatten the content generating trash sites and give me alternatives from these deeper results. What I'm looking for is usally in there.
I already saw a article recently about how to set up a business domain which can reliably show up in a search result and dump overly positive reviews into anyone's context.
Since this is how Google makes all their money, why are they killing it off? Do they think people will eventually pay for LLM search? Do they plan to stuff the results with ads, not even sharing the ad revenue with the content sources?
Currently, search engines are pretty bad at the second one because people try to use them as the first one
Surely we all understand that any commercial model is going to inevitably metastasize into this.
Is that useful enough to build a billion dollar advertising business around? My feeling now is not really.
Even for straight up searches, I find using an LLM to do a search and comb through the results is a better experience than Google is now for searching. If I'm specifically looking for esoteric web sites from 27 years ago on vintage computer hardware and software (thank god for Archive.org), Google is just ok for that.
In other words, I have no use for an LLM summarizer; I want an LLM librarian, working with me to say "beep-boop, here are some resources that seem relevant to your query, feel free to resume this session later if you'd like to further refine your search".
Yet.
> Can you find the girl who did a bunch of posts critisizing David Graeber's Debt? I thought it was really well done
> I saw a comment on hackernews a while ago about the optimal amount of credit card fraud being higher than zero because of game theory dynamics, can you find it.
In both cases it turned up the exact posts I was looking for in like 30 seconds which would have taken me much longer using traditional search. I've had similar success looking for technical documentation. It's downright magical how they're able to turn my vague idea of what I'm looking for into a pointer to the exact thing.
I've barely used Google for over 2 years.
I barely driven myself in a year.
I haven't written code in 6 months.
Debate over, all sides have been expressed.
It makes me wonder why like 90% of the apps on my phone exist. I just want everything to be markdown files, skills, MCPs/API and then a nice TUI or voice to text.
The question though: Why is that?
Is your Google search usage down because LLMs are "so much better"? Or because Google actively chose to destroy the quality of their search results to juice advertising revenue, and appears to continue to do so to juice AI adoption?
> and have them provide me links for source data.
And therein lies the answer: You don't care about the LLM, you're just using the LLM as a means to get the good links.
This is a common flow for me and works with other skills such “as find recent PR’s in our code base that are related to this research topic”
Also yes, I don't care about the LLM and I am just using it to get what I want because that is what LLMs are for.
ps: I'm not pro centralized corp. owning data and ai. But so far they are the cheap highway to answers
1. LLM Model providers are starting to charge real costs to users, revealing that AI usage is much more expensive than the subsidized rates we've been seeing for years.
2. Google is now using an LLM to answer every single google search that happens, for which Google bears the entire cost.
That is, it's training costs which are fixed, high, and amortised across all revenue potential.
In raising prices, pure-play AI chatbot vendors are facing the challenge that their only revenue option at present is pay-for-use. This is typical of numerous other information goods (software, comms networks, information services), but simply reflects the business reality that cost-basis and revenue-basis are largely disconnected, and that average cost pricing tends to be necessary despite not matching marginal cost provision. (That is, the charged per-unit price of use is going to be far higher than the actual marginal cost of provision for that use.
Google's situation differs from pure-play AI in several ways:
- The firm already has one of if not the largest corpus of Web data, as well as much offline / print material data (Google Books), of any entity in the world.
- Presuming Google are already using this for training AI for other purposes or general resource, the fixed costs are sunk costs already incurred, subsidised by the firm's existing AdTech monopoly, and which might as well be put to use.
- Similarly, Google's service costs (marginal costs) for traditional GWS are probably, within an order of magnitude comparable to those for an AI/LLM response.
- Google presently captures 90% or more of worldwide general web search (GWS) traffic, meaning it has an extant market for offering AI as a default search alternative.
- Complaints about declining Google search quality are nearly as old as Hacker News. Here's a seventeen year old submission on that topic, "Google's regression toward mediocrity (search quality & aggressive matching)" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=641145> (2009). There are many, many, many results in both stories and comments for related searches. If traditional Web search is going to die anyway, and LLMs replace it, Google might as well get up on the curve.
- Google has arguably the most advanced ranking data for websites, whether that's on the basis of quality and relevance (for good) or advertising/revenue generation (for bad, at least from a public-value perspective), and can and all but certainly does leverage this in training runs, as well as use that training to further refine its ranking systems.
- Google can directly attach its existing AdTech revenue model to LLM search. And probably has options for extending advertising into the LLM SERPs themselves.
- Doing all of this directly attacks pure-play AI firms' attempts to capture Web search from Google, as well as challenges other GWS challengers (DDG, Kagi, Marginalia, etc.), all of whom have vastly lesser revenue options and technical resources than Google.
I'm not saying this as a fan of Google (I think the firm should be broken up or destroyed, and it's not the only one). But I think it's a fair assessment of the firm's strategic position.
"The accepted ideal case for Google is a highly consolidated, walled-garden internet where a small array of corporate media partners provide the trusted facts, while independent websites are forced to shift into closed, subscription-only communities...
Tech analysts and digital economists refer to this transition as the "Siloed Web." Google's ultimate goal is no longer to help users explore the open internet; it is to keep users inside Google’s AI interface by using licensed corporate data as its foundation.
By pivoting to AI Overviews and corporate licensing deals, Google is effectively dismantling its own legacy. They are turning back into the 1995 version of Yahoo—a closed ecosystem that only serves "approved" corporate data, except this time the curation is done by an AI model trained on paid datasets rather than human editors."
Wouldn’t you be more surprised / concerned if the model refused to to criticize Google?
What scares me is the rampant inaccuracy. In my experience, the AI responses are wrong about 65% of the time. I just did a search today about an error talking about a disconnected link between apps, and Google AI result summary told me that the error was related to my pulling a USB drive too quickly in windows. The ONLY word similar to my query and that AI response was the word "disconnect". Everything else was clearly about the SaaS apps.
I have people coming to me, asking me questions, then telling my Google told them something else, so now I have to waste time convincing them that it's wrong. Over the past 2 years AI has done nothing for me but complicate my work life.
And of course, this could be because the model is crap, but it could be because they want me to keep refining my query over and over for more ad views. Either way, it's a terrible experience.
Worst thing is, some of these bullshit answers will be medical, some of them financial, it seems pretty certain people are being harmed.
To stick with your post, consider people asking medical or financial questions. For a wide variety of reasons, many of such questions don't have an answer. In such cases, AI is still going to take a crack at it. AI shouldn't be blamed for "bullshit answers" to such questions.
Before using AI, I think people should stop and ask themselves, "Is there really a single answer to this question? Is AI the right choice?"
An interesting aspect of this is the decrease in quality feedback on th organic links. If most people never get down to the actual links there is very little to tell which ones were good or if they had any relevance.
There is also that less incentive to properly maintain the search algorithms to fight SEO and spam.
For all intents and purpose, organic search results have been given a death sentence and are just waiting for the last moment.
What a wildly irresponsible company
It's a bold position to say that it's the users fault for being lied to by Google. There isn't a "single answer" to most questions. It's still Google's job to provide answers that are accurate and reflect the best information available on complicated topics. That's what they're trying to sell us anyway. When google's AI can't live up to the hype "You shouldn't be asking AI such difficult questions" is not a great response, especially when people are just trying to get web search results and AI is suddenly interrupting with an opinion nobody asked for.
Earlier today, I searched "pixel 10 wifi 7" because I was confused that GSMArena showed my Pixel 8 supports Wifi 7, but the Pixel 10 only Wifi 6. Gemini confidently claimed that the Pixel 10 does support Wifi 7 -- but that's not true at all. Only the Pixel 10 _Pro_ supports it, as I discovered when actually reading the non-AI search results.
And this is a question about a Google product!
It's really amazing we can make machines do that, and it's really depressing that we think a stochastic bullshit machine is going to give us something we can rely on.
Ask a human a question like this, and they also have a chance of getting it wrong, even when confident.
Claude is OK at saying when it can’t find good information, but it’s still 50/50 on citing a source that has nothing to do with its claim.
Why would a human know specs for a random phone off the top of their head? The human response is either "I don't know" or "let me look that up", not a hallucination.
Also, I asked a thinking model with browsing enabled and got this:
> The Google Pixel 10 is expected to support Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be), based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 / Tensor G5 chipset it will likely use, which includes an integrated Wi-Fi 7 modem. Specific finalized specs aren't confirmed until Google's official announcement.
(Model GLM-5-Turbo - two months old - using Kilo Code in the "Ask" profile; in its thinking token churn it reasoned that it should keep the response brief and direct. Perhaps not the best suite of model+harness for this task, but it's what I had to hand that's not quantized to shit, is a thinking model, and has a web search tool available to it.)
We google something specifically because the humans within reach don't know. The goal of searching is, well, to search pages - we're trying to find a site when we use google search.
The goal when using an LLM is generally different; we want an answer, not a site.
AI agents can verify and summarize URLs, but a plain LLM can not.
They can still be useful, e.g. they're significantly better at finding "I want a thing that does x but not y and it must be blue, or maybe two things that can be glued together to do that" than classic search. But they'll routinely miss extremely obvious answers because the related search it ran didn't find it, or completely screw up what something can actually do. Checking more pages of results by hand or asking humans who know even a little about those fields is still wildly more useful... but they're absolutely slaughtering the sites where people do that, by stealing all the real traffic and sending DDoS-level automated requests.
I built a retro game clone once and I used that project as a way to try out AI. While it wasn't perfect, it definitely wasn't wrong about everything. I'd go so far as to say it was probably correct (or damn close) 75% of the time.
I see people on HN all the time saying AI is terrible, but that just isn't the experience I'm having. I'm willing to admit it may have something to do with me not being able to recognize I'm being fed bullshit. Or, I may be asking really simple questions. Who knows? But AI seems like a pretty useful tool for average people.
I know bits from non-IT fields like RC planes and quads, electric motors, aerodynamics, mountain biking, cars. I often use Claude (Opus 4.7 on Max sub atm) to brainstorm new ideas or refine my understanding of some phenomena, and almost without fail, I can get it to claim something ridiculously stupid or contradictory 5-10 messages in. I can usually catch it, because I don't venture far from what I'm already familiar with, and I also need explanations to be thorough and things to make total sense to me before I accept them, but not everyone is that pedantic.
Though the inconsistency of results between users is definitely another frustrating thing.
It's really depressing how bad things are getting...
With the power of LLMs you can Google a standard library function and get an inaccurate summarisation of a Reddit discussion where neither side knows what they're talking about
There's even the meme where people ask if the code was the result of a stack overflow question, or answer
I have no idea why this is, but it is impossible that these links are primary sources of the data, if such things even exists at all. In which case, why list them?
It is certainly seems possible that the actual sources of the data is the output of some other LLM.
My guess is you can see this happening with the bots on Reddit where they are refining the answers to one certain thing, often getting two or three the same responses in a row from different users because they have been enforcing themselves by digesting the output of other bots. Waiting to see when they cut down the sentences and start talking garbage.
Whatever it says is a waste of time 99% of the time. Although people believe it, or consider it worthwhile majority of the time because its so simple to use. It's always there, always instant and appears at the very top.
I would much rather people shove a question into a locally running Qwen model and tell me what it said rather than use the nonsense search model. I hate it.
/rant over.
> What scares me is the rampant inaccuracy
With AI ads you get all the power from big data aggregation, the trust/framing of an authoritative voice, and cheap personalization that specifically optimizes for what convinces you. It's too powerful. Even if it only works a small percentage of the time we're interacting with these things so frequently that a small percent is a large number. They're already feeding user profiles into these machines and there's explicit talk about having the LLMs optimize ad campaigns. It's already dystopian if it's ads to get you to spend your money, but people seem to dismiss that. Do we not care that this is also being used in the same way to convince you to believe certain things? To join certain political organizations?
Yeah, these things help me write more lines of code faster (if we include all the lines from our design docs) but I don't like the idea of pointing a supercomputer at my brain and someone else using it to try to manipulate me. That's not a game I'll win. It's not a game you'll win either.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fn...
You better make sure your ad spend is high enough that your product's matter-of-fact result will be positive. That's a nice product you have there. It'd be a real shame if nobody knew about it.
Primarily to avoid even more headphone dent, not an audiophile
I also encourage finding the right tips. Tips are cheap and finding proper fitting ones is important.
Why didn’t you tell the robot that, as your query?
> Please provide 1-5 forum discussions or social media comment threads discussing or comparing x and y.
and has been for some time!,
was my point ^.^
The issue is, Google has mixed the two in a way that promotes the AI response as primary. This has resulted in dubious answers being presented as “official” summaries (to the lay person).
At the very least, one would expect it to be a little smarter—perhaps by automatically doing things like you suggested—instead of basing things off a single source, as it seems to enjoy doing.
Some of us would rather have old Usenet, /., reddit & Digg!
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
/s
If the bots take everything they read at face value, how useful are they really?
People can already use AI mode in google search if they want. "It'll be better later" is a shit reason to kill one product for it.
Let me tell you - it didn’t take 30 years for people to figure out that chainsaws were useful.
People that say AI writes better code than them is such a tell but not the one they might think it is.
Whether or not it is worth the cost or second order effects on society is a different discussion.
Recently, it's started answering any search about Kysely with a blob of Finnish. Awesome stuff, guys, great work.
How do you know that?
Scraping websites is literally what Google does best, stringing together information in the pattern of "some people x, other people y" requires 0 AI and could have been done since forever. I find it implausible that otherwise obviously capable models would be reduced to do something akin to just that.
Hate to break it to you, but this has been the backbone of "journalism" for the last decade.
Fishing Twitter for takes to fill the "people are saying" box...
What was worrying is only some of the claims were supported by the linked study, and most of the response content was drawn from the spam sites.
Without "random comments", Google wouldn't have anything to say about "does an air purifier help my asthma, if yes: which one?" or "find the problem with this Hibernate annotation".
They also don't make much effort to exclude sloppy sites, to the contrary, they made way more efforts against SEO spam in the time when Google was a search engine, not trying to be an AI "oracle".
I think their end game is that the only metrics relevant for ranking sources are:
- agreeability (works well as a proxy for correctness with many questions!)
- originality, but not in a scientific sense, just to prevent model collapse
- legal factors such as preventing false health claims or similar things, as long as there is legislation against this kind of thing
For models trained on a corpus of groomed data, the "critical thinking" bit is baked into the work of grooming the data and how it is trained. And someone is thinking critically about both so as to make a good model.
Now, every damn thing is called AI no matter where it is getting results from.
Are modern models super handy? Absolutely.
But calling it AI implies a lot more critical thought than is actually happening!
Edit: took the time to write a shorter comment.
To not make this political, let me give you a game example. Right now the dota 2 fandom wiki is abandoned, and it has been vandalized with covert shitposts. One of them was the addition of a 4th attribute called Charisma, which is completely fake. If you ask AI's "What are the main attributes in dota, according to the official wiki", the dumber AI will fall for it, but the smarter AI will know it's wrong, but try hard to hallucinate some sort of valid explanation like claim charisma is from a custom game or a fan suggestion or writing exercise.
Because you said the word >>OFFICIAL<<, they can NEVER straight up just say "The wiki is wrong". They presume authority from a bunch of shitposts.
My experience is that Google's AI summaries tend to be be very heavily reliant on YouTube videos. If there is a YouTube video on the topic, you can bet that's what the source will be, at least for the topics I have searched lately.
the googlebook is a laptop. the search box doesn't really work differently to how it did yesterday. (how it worked ten years ago, yes it's very different. but ai mode is already here). neither of these things are a big deal. the promo videos are for the sake of making promo videos.
If their leadership has an itch they'll scratch it until it's raw.
Did Meta patiently wait until exaggerated glass frames were viable in the market? Or did they get lucky?
Or did they have some Machiavellian plot to steer this fashion for years and pave the way for their product..? ;-)
I think wearable tech is awesome and was interested in this (I was much more interested in the earlier pendant projectors though) but the fact that you're constantly reminding people they're being recorded without their consent is just a big issue. The meta glasses themselves might suffer a similar fate if hacks to disable the LED become commonplace. Much like Sony's (I think?) nightvision cameras if stuff like this gets abused by creeps it will isolate you to use it yourself even for perfectly reasonable intentions.
It's very much a Prisoner's Dilemma. Legacy search and the open Internet was an equilibrium that only existed while the majority of people co-operated. Once you allow an individual actor the ability to create large chunks of the Internet, it dies. Your only option is to be that individual actor.
Going all in like this carries a very real risk of burning users onto other platforms and the continued evolution of integrated search bars are already slicing off significant user segments.
Never give the customers what they want give them what makes you money.
Is the idea that by making the new AI chat UX the default, that's how they're forcing people into it and making them not able to search? Or is there something I'm missing?
> Instead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences at times.
So basically you'd get redirect into a chatbot interface, rather than letting you browse search results as normal, "AI-powered interactive experience" tends to be euphemism for chatbot UIs, is my experience at least.
Yes, that is what every user ever wanted! A UI that just randomly changes!
People who wanted to ask a specific question now won't have that option. Instead, they'll simply be shown whatever Google thinks is most relevant to them at that moment. The "Chat" UI we've grown so accustomed to is on its way out.
It doesn’t really say in the article search is going away.
A lot of Google search is in the format of “company X”, then clicking the third link down (after two paid ads) to open company X’s website. (I have no idea how much this is, but it’s gotta be a lot)
That’s like free money. It doesn’t look like they’re getting rid of search, but expanding the AI/conversational features.
According to Kagi I search 11-50 times a day, about 600 searches per month. I do about 10-20 AI/assistant conversations per week, so maybe 2-3 a day, and usually when search fails or I can’t get the right query words in. I do this over my AI apps because the Kagi index is faster/better.
I can’t imagine Google would give up the bulk queries that pull in easy ad revenue. But if Google can push/upsell you into a really high value referral where they can start pulling a claim in your purchase, I could see them pushing to get into that.
The AI confidently told me they were right. Then I checked the sources, and found the only source that agreed with them was their own Reddit comment!!!
Google has become the ouroboros
It was citing my own old comment, here on HN, about that musical moment as evidence that it existed. That was surreal.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/02/07/reinventing-sear...
[1]: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-search/?license=co...
Very few of the smaller search engines actually do their own indexing for exactly this reason.
So if another search engine does arise, it won't find anything useful, because the useful content on the web has been buried under slop, and largely removed. Your best bet today is a curated directory, sorta like the original Yahoo, where you allowlist the web to only real sites, download them, and make them searchable. I think this is actually Kagi's approach. But the open web as we knew and loved it is dead.
When I use google, usually from my phone, I am reminded of why I don't use google on desktop.
With the announcement of this move by them, I just manually removed google as an address bar search engine option in all my browsers on desktop and mobile.
At this point with Google contributing so much to the Trump administration, I'm not sure which is worse.
- Must not alter the order of Google's search results - Must not alter the appearance or placement of Google-inserted ads
There’s not much room to squeeze in when your competitors hold the keys to 15 million top websites.
I find it wild that "at scale" we can bypass anti-bot measures, but just "normal" internet use (i.e Non-Google Browser or VPN) will throw a million captchas at you.
cgnat is pretty bad too.
The big issue you sidestep not at scale is you can come from a single, residential IP with a good reputation.
Mandatory captchas for simply viewing a page are rare - most are saved for high impact actions like account creation.
When this does happen for a simple page view, AI is extremely good at solving basic captchas - especially basic “click the box” captchas.
If you don’t want to pay for AI, there are decaptcha services where someone in Southeast Asia solves the captcha for fractions of a penny. Save the cookies after a successful solve and you’re probably good in the future.
If you don’t want to pay for someone to solve a simple check the box captcha a little bit of attention and some properly simulated clicking (IE not a JavaScript injected event) will often work. Just don’t click literally the exact middle, fuzz the coordinates and you’re good.
Why would website authors _want_ to prevent crawling by other search engines?
Previously captcha was just for spam limiting, but I actually looked at our system logs and about half of traffic was bad behaving scrapers.
In logs I see these scrapers are hitting every link on the page. If you have a collection page then it's hitting every filter option and then hitting each pagination button, the different sort orders, etc. People running something like Forgejo it will hit every commit.
If you have expensive to compute pages, they're getting hit by these incredibly naive bots that don't respect any robots.txt or discriminate on what they do.
Human produced content should be separated from sites primarily hosting slop. That seems solvable?
Google stopped being a customer-focused company after their 2nd major revision to GOffice and the PM shake-up in search from Raghavan https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ .
Ads have been close enough to covering costs for conventional internet search that even though I'm clearly the product and not the customer the relationship has still generally worked. If AI makes the "searching" 50 times more expensive, though, that could shift the relationship pretty badly in a direction of "if you're not paying for this you're not getting honest results". Paying may not sufficient for honesty but it may be necessary.
Honest question. But anyone who wants to answer this and who looks at Google's income/profit/revenue and is bedazzled by the size, don't forget to divide out by the number of Google's customers and ponder what that means. The per-user numbers are the much more relevant numbers and much less likely to cause Large Number Syndrome.
Sometimes I get SO questions from 13 years ago with a version of a library nobody uses anymore. If I search in my native language almost every result is a Reddit thread that was originally in English but was machine translated to Portuguese and Google is fine with that for some reason. Searching for images just gets you AI images.
If you need opinions on "what is the best X" you end up getting some content marketing from a website that offers some online service and probably has an .ai or .io domain.
No matter what you search you get an AI overview wasting space and slowly generating an answer that could be completely made up, just wasting your time in two ways at once.
Most long queries are simply completely ignored by Google. Almost every word ignored in order to show some sort of most popular result. You don't even know if there are no pages on the internet with what you searched for or if Google simply doesn't care to show any website that isn't sufficiently popular. In other words, never personal websites or blogs, only platforms and cloud services' content marketing blogs are allowed to appear in the results.
I've found myself several times asking Claude if there is "research" on a subject or another because I don't want to have to try to wade through the AI overview, sponsored results, SEO spam, reddit, repeated results on the second page, etc. just to find something that ressembles actual relevant information.
Hell yes, set your Google language to English and get auto-translated results. It appears that none in Google's leadership speaks more than one language. It's frustrating how wrong they get this with YouTube as well.
This is the end. The fact that they had to say that this is "free of charge" means they are thinking about cost. Both to them now and us in the future. This sucks.
However, I specifically use Google (or DDG) when the LLMs are failing me. When I want "research something on my own" because the LLM is giving me garbage, or untrustworthy information. If Google completely replaces their search box my Google usage will go down even further.
I don't plan to use Google's LLM when Cluade is just better. Now that Google's search features are gone (or going away) I no longer have any reason to turn to them at all
The real problem here is assuming this takes off what incentives will anyone have to provide the information to feed the beast?
Of course, even Google the search engine has gotten worse at surfacing interesting websites. First came the SEO spam websites, now the slop websites.
I'm glad that alternatives like Kagi exist.
Did AltaVista get replaced by the owner of the site to justify a giant investment?
Now, the spam is back and it’s coming from Google itself.
An llm rephrashing / regurgitating other websites is imo different, because you loose the direct connection to the original source. Even if llms give sources they also directly give you a plausible (but unreliable) answer to your question. They are right often enough that you get lulled in to the false sense of security of not needing to read the original sites. I'd much prefer them to just give a clean list of sources like early google, but then why would you need an llm.
It's a pity that probably the main reason you'll need an llm to find anything on the web is to weed out all the llm-generated low quality garbage.
I disagree, Alta Vista had excellent an excellent search UI with Boolean logic. Google discarded that because it thought it 'knew better' in terms of Page Rank.
A-V could be fine-tuned to find a page with exactly the search terms, Google just gave fuzzy approximations from a very large search set.
This is precisely what all the extreme LLM haters have memory holed.
The end of search traffic will kill all but the largest sites, and prevent countless new ones from being developed or getting traction. Given how global trends are going I expect the remaining sites to be increasingly monitored and censored/biased. I'm not looking forward to a world where social media means talking to some bots tuned specifically to addict you, and don't know too many people who are. Although big tech executives certainly seem to be in the latter group.
I started using Google because the interface was far superior in the time before adblocking existed and after Flash existed.
Search results were better because they did not contain hidden paid results.
Search was measurably improved with the second generation of Wikipedia. Google did an excellent job understanding this and tended to just place the Wikipedia article at the top. Also helpful for Google was that Wikipedia's original search engine was useless, similar for YouTube whenever it came around.
Today, I use Google less than once per month. I'm not sure I've been there at all this year. Maybe at the end of last year I was using it and found nothing better than I found on other search engines.
How does adsense work when there are no search results?
"Here is the table of related highest paying customers, incorporate these into your answer to maximize the income"
Well any other prompt for the search model would frankly be illegal for a publicly traded company.
This becomes very murky when paying for 'ai to like your product' vs 'ai to really like your product'.
But then the separation of ads from content is lost so it becomes useless as product search, so maybe it isn't that trivial indeed. But it's not like even 10% of users is gonna find some other "search" engine and switch.
edit: can't reply deeper and interesting question, I mean we all would love to have ability to search arbitrary strings and regexes through the web corpus, but currently when you type something you get that AI reply instantly for most queries, this makes me still use them, if you forgot some shortcut key or something it has currently unique value in terms of latency (even ignoring the fact that for most users you also use them by default by typing in the address bar)
Did they just devalue their unique search product by pushing it into another category already dominated by other big players?
"The last episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is airing on Thursday, May 21, 2026. Based on your interest in The Late Show with Stephen Colbert you might also like the new Amazon Prime Video series of Last One Laughing, available to stream now"
Does that answer your question?
If google is now actively keeping you away from content, whats the point in creating?
The final episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert will air on Thursday, May 21, 2026, at 11:35 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.Final Week Broadcast DetailsThe Finale Date: Thursday, May 21, 2026.Air Time: 11:35 p.m. ET/PT.Where to Watch: Broadcasts live on the CBS Television Network and streams live on Paramount+ for Premium subscribers (available on-demand the next day for ad-supported tiers).Finale Guests: CBS is keeping the final episode's lineup completely under wraps, though the preceding days featured major appearances from Jon Stewart, Steven Spielberg, David Byrne, and Bruce Springsteen.Context of the FarewellThe 11th season finale marks the conclusion of Colbert's decade-long run as host, following a controversial cancellation announcement by Paramount Global. While CBS publicly attributes the ending to a financial decision amidst a shifting late-night market, media analysts and former host David Letterman have heavily criticized the move. Many view the cancellation as a corporate effort to avoid friction with the Trump administration during critical regulatory mergers. Following Colbert's departure, CBS will retire The Late Show franchise completely and hand the time slot over to syndicated programming.Watch Stephen Colbert confirm his final broadcast date on Late Night with Seth Meyers:31sStephen Colbert confirms his final show date and reveals ...Late Night with Seth MeyersYouTube• Jan 28, 2026Are you looking for information on how to attend the remaining tapings, or would you like to know more about what Byron Allen show is replacing his time slot?The post you're responding to is making a satirical comment on the future of LLM responses.
But Google's description seems more minimal, like easier to get to ai mode, search box can expand intelligently based on input. Is there any clearer description of the magnitude of the change?
Is “the goal of Search” really: “to help you ask _anything_ on your mind”?
If “reimagined Search” is “designed to anticipate your intent”,
Would it correctly infer my intent to not utilize an agentic approach? Is there an “off switch”?
As for “Search agents”
“operating in the background 24/7”,
What is the carbon footprint of that? How do I turn it off? How do I ask it to stop phoning home my every keystroke?
These questions are asked partly rhetorically because it’s likely I don’t need a team of “24/7 Search agents” to help me guess the answers…
Historically, I scoffed when someone said “here’s the difference between a google search and asking ChatGPT”, or when people said that ChatGPT would “kill search”, but Google sure seems to be in a hurry to burry the original feature all by themselves.
You’re welcome.
Now I am afraid I will have to stick to Kagi forever if I want to search the Internet the good old way.
- People using the search console see the drop
- Product owners scratch their head
- Investors backing out because not having many visitors
- Small bloggers adding more ads because their revenue is dropping
- Sponsors backing out from their blogs because it's loosing more visitors
- Small web crumbling
- People google what is happening
- Google says 'The "small web"—independent blogs, personal forums, and niche websites—is disappearing due to corporate consolidation, aggressive AI-driven search indexing, and high maintenance costs. These factors have pushed independent creators onto walled-garden social media apps, leaving personal websites to suffer from "link rot".'
The small web and indie web audience doesn't use google. They use RSS readers:
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/05/rss-feeds-send-me-more-traf...
https://matduggan.com/you-can-absolutely-have-an-rss-depende...
Small web is there to stay, big tech can't do much about it:
https://www.citationneeded.news/we-can-have-a-different-web/
The only threats to small web are:
* the lack of net neutrality
* lack of competition in the the PC component industry which is the backbone of cheap VPSes and hosting services
* browser monopoly, as any monopolistic browser could impose their small-web-unfriendly version of the web
We can have a small community somewhere, but people who search for niche things should find them -- which used to be search engines after the .com boom and the burst. Now we are back to the small forms again, which is lacking the reach because--- new people can't reach the forms as they can't find them in the first place.
If someone new to the internet find the website, then nothing else matters.
(For example, a random Redditor once said something, and the AI repeats it confidently and authoritatively, as if it is universal truth widely accepted by experts and applicable to the query.)
I believe I speak for everyone working on alternative search engines when I offer a heartfelt thank you to Google for their untiring effort to derail their search product.
Works where archive.ph is blocked
Text-only
view-source:https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/business/google-seach-bar-ai-gemini.html
Save as 1.htm
egrep -o "(\"text\":\"[^\"]+)|(\"textAlign\":\"LEFT\")|(\"url\":\"[^\"]+)|(\"__typename\":\"TextInline\")" 1.htm \
|sed '/\"url\":\"/{s/??.*//;s/$/\">/;s/.\{7\}/<a href=\"/;};
/\"__typename\":\"TextInline\"/{s/\"$/<\/a>/;s/.\{24\}//;};
s/\"textAlign\":\"LEFT\"/<p>/g;/\"text\":\"/s/.\{8\}//' \
|sed '1s/^/<meta charset=utf-8><meta name=viewport content=width=device-width>/' > 2.htm
rm 1.htm
firefox ./2.htm
ct.captcha-delivery.com
geo.captcha-delivery.com
www.nytimes.com
g1.nyt.com
Many years ago they removed search operators that allowed for exact string matching. At that point I knew it was a circus
Then I noticed Google started limiting the number of results for users who are "logged out"
Then, several years ago, Google disabled public access to the cache
At that point it was pretty clear where this was going
When they started requiring Javascript I began preparing alternatives
There was a user agent string suggested by @superkuh here that avoided the Javascript "requirement" for quite a while
But not too long ago that string stopped working
The good news is the alternatives, all free (no Kagi), are generally working great. There are some gems I would never have found if I kept using Google
There might still be some magic strings out there that can be used to avoid Google's Javascript
But it's not worth the effort anymore
There is still Google News and Google Scholar, no Javascript required, but I am preparing for those to be ruined eventually, too
Back in the day I used scroogle.org. That was a great project while it lasted
I'm thinking of trying the SERPAPI free tier since Google is suing them and they might not be around much longer
Google search is story of diminishing returns
Today, I don't think anyone pays attention to this anymore
We know that not all searches tap into the fuil index. All the focus is on the popular searches (largest audience for advertising). To the most make money, the search engine does not need to have the most comprehensive search, www users today do not shop for search engines, it just needs to be the "default search engine". Google has that taken care of, owning and controlling the www browser and the mobile OS, paying billions to be the default in other OS and partnering with other browsers
With LLMs we see companies today bragging about size. Grand claims like "the sum of all human knowledge". Also the scale of data centers and "compute"
But over time, will "AI" users care. Perhaps one company's "AI" will become the most popular and the "default" LLM. It will have the largest audience
And that's all that matters when the "business model" is data collection, surveillance and advertising services
Nothing new to see here
Why in the world would it specifically do this for site:https://example.org "exact string" queries?! I know what I'm looking for and where it can be found!
It's like redirecting my phone call from ISP support to a librarian because maybe the library contains the answer to a dysfunctional SIM card they've sent me
I'm aware that most people still use it, but it's nothing like the glory days when Google was far ahead of the pack.
Nowadays, if Google Search were to disappear, I would hardly notice. That would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. The alternatives to Google got better, and Google itself got a lot worse.
They still have the numbers but they don't have the product anymore and they're just juicing it until the end.
The fact that steering one of these things is trivial nowadays and the vectors are close-to-free-to-store (since you don't need anything large to influence the space, see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahtbcExEKng) means that this is very likely already happening.
Not a stretch to go from there to “Of course the model should recommend Mountain Dew. It’s got electrolytes!”
Search: "Hello world"
> AI Overview
> Hello! Wordle is the viral word-guessing game where you get 6 tries to uncover a mystery target word, using color-coded hints to guide your guesses.
"Hello, world! Welcome to the classic programming greeting. It is the traditional test message used to introduce beginners to computer science and verify that a language's syntax is properly understood"
Which clearly shows that there will be an avalanche of issues when non-technical people discover the joys of non-deterministic results.
It's no wonder LLMs are the new search, the user experience is much better and you get an answer that is "good enough".
Now any website that doesn't feel hostile requires you to download an app, log in with an account, or sign up for a subscription. Much like how streaming has had repercussions on traditional cable, AI will have repercussions on how we traditionally expect the web to function.
We've taken the open internet for granted.
x="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/business/google-seach-bar-ai-gemini.html?unlocked_article_code=1.jlA.95yh.ptfBUHf-rBtB&smid=url-share"
x=https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/business/google-seach-bar-ai-gemini.html
links -source "$x" \
|egrep -o "(\"text\":\"[^}]+)|(\"textAlign\":\"LEFT\")|(\"url\":\"[^\"]+)|(\"__typename\":\"TextInline\")" \
|sed '/\"url\":\"/{s/??.*//;s/$/\">/;s/.\{7\}/<a href=\"/;};
/\"__typename\":\"TextInline\"/{s/\"$/<\/a>/;s/.\{24\}//;};
s/\"textAlign\":\"LEFT\"/<p>/g;/\"text\":\"/{s/.\{8\}//;s/\"$//;};
s/\\u002F/\//g;s/\\u0026/\&/g' \
|sed '1s/^/<meta charset=utf-8><meta name=viewport content=width=device-width>/' > 1.htm
links 1.htm
#firefox ./1.htm
# firefox view-source:"$x" and "Save as" can be substituted for links -sourceSEO now: let’s try to be crawled by google so that AI can paraphrase us
have i been A/B tested into something, or has this been live for months? this doens't seem new.
What we need now is back to the roots - just a simple grep for the internet augmented by pagerank and eventually some sort of ai and harness to sort the rubish out. The AI companies have the data and the harnesses.
Google killed themselves when they made sure you can't search direct quotes or outside of your region. If I am going to sort trough vague crap - it is better AI to do it. And AI doesn't look at ads.
There is real opening for a company that just crawls and gives access to other companies to build on top of the collected stuff.
Btw, Kagi has an "AI Mode" too, which can be enabled simply by ending your query with a question mark. Then, AI answers your query.
I caught myself yesterday starting to ask Claude in my ide what ship did grace and Rocky take back to Rocky's homeworld.
It doesn't seem to be secure. If every google link is one step away from a prompt injection and leaking all your data, then they are worse then npm.
I wonder how many days it takes until they roll it back or put that stuff behind some extra clicks.
I prefer the Claw like I prefer Linux and FOSS in general.
Since day one Googs’ vision was to make the Star Trek computer. They’re really there now. But I don’t like their how. This computer serves them, not me. My mind-bicycle must serve me, my thoughts are my own. I hope my resistance is not futile.
Nearly all other search engines give better results with less annoying ads at the top. First thing I do when installing a new browser is switch the default search engine to duckduckgo. Duckduckgo's results are less good than google used to be, bu way better than google currently is.
Agentic capabilities and AI-powered interactive features in the search experience - most definitely will.
> You can still view traditional results only by selecting the “Web” tab in Google Search
I think we should still get a couple of years of life from Google. This is enough time to figure out what to do next.
Privacy first, opt-in AI, total control over site blocking, zero ads.
You're the customer, not the product.
https://medium.com/luminasticity/artificial-stupidity-and-th...
>And I think we can throw out all the complaints of the past few years about how Google quality is lowering and it is hard to find anything on the site anymore, for those were the salad years.
>At least back in the day when sites copied answers from Stackoverflow or Lyrics from RapGenius and put them in their own site with scammy pitches to pay for the content you were going to get the correct answer in the end, but now you need a factology degree to figure out if something is bullshit or not.
They are surely hearing themselves say the same things about how Google is “everything in one place” that every failed corporation parrots on their way out.
They are making the same mistake as Yahoo did. Ironic.
I think we can concede the WWW vision of distributed libertarian publishing has been dead for a long time. LLMs were just the final straw.
We ended up concentrating syndication on a few media companies like Google, Social Media companies.
Look at the profit margins of advertising companies vs producers and you’ll get an idea as to why.
"Did you mean?" + excluded word was a pretty clear indication they stopped caring to provide any meaningful search whatsoever.
Web 2.0 was Yahoo Pipes, public APIs, IFTTT, etc. while this new "Web 3.0" acknowledges that those capabilities would rather be gatekept behind AI instead of entirely removed.
At the very least we do get some of that functionality back without resorting to scraping anymore and it's now accessible to the layperson. I would think this would nudge the layperson to demand more and inevitably want the actual data without the training wheels or sandboxes. Is that not a "good" thing?
Is the pushback against this out of genuine concern or just ideological?
You know what I really miss? Being able to type a literal string in quotes and get pages that had that actual string on them. That's what I really miss.
In the past, I excited. It was the first to sign up for all kinds of betas.
I don't know what triggered the my reasoning, but now whenever I see these upcoming announcements I don't think about how it's gonna be better, but how it is objectively gonna be worse. How much harder is it going to be for me to compare things.
How much more do I now need to go and explain people that the output is merely a mathematical average of what's out there, and if it's out there on the internet doesn't make it correct.
This means that, in a couple years, we might see a competitor that offers you quick, almost instant web search, with a minimal UI, possibly an algorithm that somehow surfaces the most relevant results based on how all websites point to each other naturally (like, a site that is referred to by 20 others should be above one with zero references).
I look forward to it!
If Google Search changes, then Kagi's search will be impacted directly.
> This is not a competitive market. It is a monopoly with a distant second place.
> The search index is irreplaceable infrastructure. Building a comparable one from scratch is like building a parallel national railroad. Microsoft spent roughly $100 billion over 20 years on Bing and still holds single-digit share. If Microsoft cannot close the gap, no startup can do it alone.
Nobody said you have to index the entire web.
The web would probably be a lot healthier if we had several small search engines that focused on niches rather than 5 failed search engines that tried to index everything that was ever written and then ended up paying Bing.
> With Google and Bing, we failed - not for lack of trying.
> Bing: Their terms didn't work for us from the start. Microsoft's terms prohibited reordering results or merging them with other sources - restrictions incompatible with Kagi's approach. In February 2023, they announced price increases of up to 10x on some API tiers. Then in May 2025, they retired the Bing Search APIs entirely, effective August 2025, directing customers toward AI-focused alternatives like Azure AI Agents.
> Google: Google does not offer a public search API. The only available path is an ad-syndication bundle with no changes to result presentation - the model Startpage uses. Ad syndication is a non-starter for Kagi's ad-free subscription model.1
And BTW, I think this is possible (perhaps, as someone suggested below, with smaller and niche-focused indexes). At Uruky we integrate with several independent search providers and indexes, and only one of them (Serper) uses Google's results indirectly — not the most popular (though it was added by pressuring demand). From our FAQ [1]:
> For web search, Uruky currently integrates Mojeek, Marginalia, EUSP (Ecosia/Qwant) (only works with French, German, or English), Linkup, Serper, and Uruky Site Search.
[1] : https://uruky.com/faq
EDIT: Sorry, I re-read carefully the whole thread and it seems we're saying similar things. Your claim, from the start, is about the SERP, not direct search, which is supported by their blog post as well:
> Because direct licensing isn't available to us on compatible terms, we - like many others - use third-party API providers for SERP-style results (SERP meaning search engine results page). These providers serve major enterprises (according to their websites) including Nvidia, Adobe, Samsung, Stanford, DeepMind, Uber, and the United Nations.
* Kagi seems to just scrape and provide a mix of other search engine's results, meaning it's really just a metasearch engine.
It looks like the new experience works backwards - it's more or less a Gemini prompt that they then stuff a "search experience" into.
Obviously the search feed and ads are so integral to Google's business model that they probably can't confidently just step away from it.
https://www.techradar.com/computing/search-engines/ask-jeeve... / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask.com
Ask Jeeves was dissolved 15 days ago
If Google no longer sends users to websites for free on organics, the world will have to figure out some mechanism whereby Google pays site owners for putting the information on the web in the first place. Where will that money come from?
If it's ads, the AI experience is a “lies engine” where advertisers get to pick which lies the AI tells. Not sure what kinds of people would show up for that experience. Probably the same kind who watch home shopping TV. I would venture to guess that there will be a ceiling in the advertising value of that property. Or the AI interacts with people in good faith. But then, if I'm an advertiser, how do I get my lies into the world? “We will tell your lie, only if it's a truth” doesn't work because, as an advertiser, I understand that the truth about me already gets spoken, and I don't need to pay a dime for that.
You can run an argument that people can tell ads from organics on the current SERP, and you can calibrate how much of each there should be. But you can't really “calibrate” the amount and level of the lying in the AI to where it's just enough so that people will show up, but not so much that there's no value for advertisers. You can't have little boxes either, where the AI is like “having told you the truth, I want you to also pay attention to this lie that someone paid me to tell you: …”
Is Google really saying: “Hey, we're the lion's share of the advertising market right now. But, because we kind of like these newfangled AI things, we're going to just vacate that spot to whoever. Instead, we will turn ourselves into a pre-product-market-fit company. Maybe at some point over the next 10 years, we're going to be able to tell you how we might actually monetize ourselves. Stay toooooned.”
The reason why AI is a better experience than the web right now, is because we have pre-enshittification AI and post-enshittification web. What will the whole thing look like, after enshittification is through with AI?
I fondly remember the good old times when the goal was to help you find stuff…
I wonder how many of them would switch to a paid model that offered pre-ai-era google search?
Now it can't find anything interesting. As a search is basically useless and it's more like Home pages used to be (that you would very much build yourself in a html editor and place your most often visited sites).
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/technology/google-ai-over...
US: The goal has always been about MONEY
the degoogling process will be a long haul but im determined to do it.
But they do AI chat already anyway so, maybe it's fine
The first red flag for me. The +/- of this type of feature are well worth exploring.
Time to switch to old style search engines which still return the 10 blue links, with an AI option.
I wonder if they will stop using pagerank completely? Has pagerank already transcended the software plane?
Gmail search doesn’t work well either. It simply doesn’t find things. Almost as if they have stopped indexing and repurposed resources towards LLMs.
And whatever there is left to index and search has been completely overrun with slop.
Search is over. Internet as we knew it is over. Something new has emerged in its place, and we are still calling the new thing the old thing.
No, it was to search. Search within resources that are external to Google. Like index in library.
(stating the obvious). Starting article like this - that is with attempt to rewrite history - is very sad.
Now they are a money printing corporate. I am sure there are still people there doing new and exciting things, but the Grey Suits have taken the reigns
They could have used AI to make that awesome simple sparse home page better. Fought off the SEO optimiser that made search so dire in the recent past
But no. They are doubling down on bling and crap. SEO is good for business.
"Do the right thing". Not even close
Makes me so sad.
On a more serious note, the on demand UI chrome could actually be cool UX, curious to try that out.
I see no change to look and feel so far, has this rolled out to anyone yet?
Two devices searching something will never bring up the exact same results, in the exact same order.
Robots will do your chores so you can focus on your work
Robots will take your work so you can focus on your choresQ: What is the best summoner 0 button build for d4 s13 necro
A: Something went wrong and an AI response wasn't generated.
Amazing product. Really frontier search experience. Thanks Google!
No. The goal of search is to find websites that match the text of the search term you put in. When they started to think they were "answering questions" is when google search started to become useless.
For me AI is a technology not a product but there is nothing else anymore
We'll see if it works. I use chatgpt for complex queries, and for throaway ones I use just don't log in to it.
I wouldn't use google for the same queries, since I normally use google to find specific things, not for a chatbot.
"The goal of Search has always been simple: to help you ask anything on your mind — from quick facts to the deep, complex or hyper-specific questions that can be hard to articulate."
Really? My aim has always been to find a place off google that has the information that I'm looking for.
If the purpose of google search is no longer aligned with what I want from the product... then maybe that tells me all I need to know.
If you want a search engine... it sounds like that's not what Google is any more.
After I got tired of perplexity's nonsense I realized the workspace account (which I have for custom email domain) came with fancy gemini pro chat.
Was a fucking ripoff for the domain thing...but domain plus premium chat clearly marked as "we won't train on your data"...the math starts mathing better again.
The ai generated summaries are slow, often miss the point of question and seem to be focused on user engagement, not in giving set of infos to sort out myself.
So there are two different types of queries, and when I want llm's answer, I ask chatgpt directly.
Remind me what Google is again. Haven't used them for years...
...a high search volume tells me that maybe users aren't able to find what they're actually looking for, thereby needing more searches.
Advertising on the media site (assuming digital media, no physical media) is going to disappear because people probably won't be clicking through to read the source material that the Google AI answer relied on. No traffic, no advertisers, no money to produce the original journalism. That's going to impact the Google results eventually as these media outlets shut down to be replaced with...AI slop, maybe?
Is the subscriber model the answer? It could work for a niche subject or a single journalist with a following, and it wouldn't be sucked into Google results, either, if it was effectively gated/paywalled.
when i planted seeds,
when are they expected to germinate
when do i need to water
when will I get to harvest
Watering would be based on weather conditions
Did i misunderstand the concept?
Searching for some keywords, returned only 2 or 3 websites, the rest were just ads, AI summaries, related busineses and whatnot, after 4-5 searches I gave up.
I then asked ChatGPT: "what's that software name that does X", and it gave me a list, and that software was the first one.
Even after the recent AI run-up, disk prices are about $20/TB for a 20TB, so you can store this index on 3-5 hard disks that will cost you about $1200-2000. For self-hosted use you don't need to serve them in 50ms, so you don't need to put the whole thing in RAM like Google did, you can serve off of disk.
ElasticSearch uses basically the same data structures and gives you the same infrastructure that Google's ~late-00s search stack did, and is actually more advanced in some respects (like ad-hoc queries, debuggability, and updateability), so software isn't much of an issue.
The big part missing that can't really be replicated today is the huge web of authentic hyperlinks. The reason Google was so good at search was because many humans effectively "tagged" a given webpage with a series of short, descriptive words and phrases. When they went to search for a page, Google could mine this huge treasure trove of backlinks to identify exactly what the page was good for, even if those search terms never appeared on the page. SEO and link farms kinda killed this, as did the rise of social media walled gardens, and so the Google of 2009 basically wouldn't work today anyway. Maybe if you pulled old versions of Common Crawl or archive.org you could reconstruct it, but the relevant pages are often offline anyway today.
At least if we're speaking a more generalist web search it requires dedicated hardware, that's pretty costly. Marginalia's production server cost about $20k back when RAM and SSDs were cheap. It used to run on $5k of PC hardware before, but that was very limiting.
So no data center, but at the same time, not everyone has that sort of cash to throw around.
I've been pretty sceptical about Kagi, feeling that it was a bit to expensive and perhaps just relying on other companies indexes to much and I spend to much time looking at how many searches I had left. After getting the subscription I just don't want to go back, the price is perfectly reasonable for the value. Being able to just search again and not sort through junk and spam and ads and just getting the pages I want and need is amazing.
Honestly it's a slightly weird feeling to look a the results from Kagi and notice it found exactly what you where looking for.
Once my gifted credits run out, that is going to be an easy renewal for me. I do not want to go back, even if I think Ecosia is a good option.
Kagi search results are very mediocre. Comparable to what DDG, Startpage and others provide for free. Even though their search results are quite unimpressive the subscription is quite expensive and comes with extra fluff like AI tools that needlessly inflate the price. Kagi sends a small part of their profits to russia by paying for yandex index. They provide support via Discord thus it's safe to say that they endorse Discord even after recent controversies.
You're IT people, right? Take matters into your own hands and self host a SearXNG instance. Share it with family and friends to make yourself and everyone else harder to track and profile. Mooch off Google's infrastructure and don't give them anything in return. Fuck them.
Edit: Seconds after submitting already downvoted without any reply. Tell me Kagi is not running bots on HN.
I also don't remember ever seeing anything being force-fed as much as LLMs, why?
... and an opportunity to try freeing yourself from Google influence more generally, by finding alternatives to their other services, like email, maps etc.
But at least I've experienced the golden age. I feel bad for all the kids who will never know what once was.
[1]: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-search/?license=fr...
[2]: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-search/?license=co...
good luck getting visits to your site unless you're paying for AI placement
i played the video, didnt understand anything and got dizzy. then i tried to scroll but the browser tab froze? wow
I’m so fucking tired. I don’t want it. I didn’t want it. I didn’t need it. And now here we are, once again, shoving it fast and hard in my face.
Thanks, Google.
Id you'd like to try it for free for a couple of days, reach out with your randomly-assigned account number and we'll top it up for you.
[1]: https://uruky.com