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Comment by osigurdson | Hacker News Reader

I actually like AI mode in Google. My main reason is if I just have a quick question it seems a lot quicker than logging into ChatGPT/Claude as I can just type it in the address bar.

Of course DDG / others can do the exact same thing as they already have an AI mode. Maybe you can even set up ChatGPT as a search engine - not sure. The key for this use case is speed - it has to be nearly instant.

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Kagi does this really nicely, you just add a question mark at the end and it'll add on top of the search results an LLM summary of what's been found. It's subpar in quality but more than enough to aggregate the results by theme

Yeah you'd need to support it in the term itself. So many queries coming from the url bar. As opposed to a toggle or something. I wonder if we have info on that - what percentage is input in address bar vs google homepage/app.

The problem is that's not discoverable though. The toggle on google.com would be nice but most people probably arent searching that way.

>I actually like AI mode in Google. My main reason is if I just have a quick question it seems a lot quicker than logging into ChatGPT/Claude as I can just type it in the address bar.

This is the exact use-case, and it makes a lot of sense. The hard part for Google is identifying when someone wants search and when someone wants an AI response. It's somewhat identifiable by the input but of course thats extremely messy to determine systematically.

Just do what Kagi does and turn on AI mode only if there's a "?" At the end of the query.

They are already doing something like that though. It's not just a ? mark, but they are getting some signal from the input and classifying it as a search term or AI prompt. Not all inputs have an AI response.

And a "?" at the end is not going to capture a lot of real LLM prompts like "What should I pack for my vaction? Im going to Florida in September."

I mean you could do something like this. But it's really not much different than other manual search codes that are used by more power users like like "", "site:" etc.

They probably have a term for it but their AI response is just another "embedded result" for lack of a better term. Like displaying the local weather directly at the top when you search "weather", etc.

It was funny how the other way when I searched for "nvm" to look up Node Version Manager, the AI mode thought I was saying "nevermind" to it. It felt quite jarring.

The problem is that it’s both slow and treacherous. They can work on performance but the convenience is really undercut by it being wrong a significant amount of the time and incomplete even more frequently so I have to review the search results anyway.

People already talked about the Kagi Quick Answer feature with the question mark.

But if you still want ChatGPT/Claude, then you simply create a custom bang and associate it with something like `https://chatgpt.com/?q=%s`

So now in your address bar you type "how to center a div !gpt" and it will start a session with your query

If you use Firefox, then you can add chatgpt as a search engine with keyword gpt. Then you can type "gpt how to centre a div" into your address bar and get the same thing without routing it through Kagi, or needing Kagi.

Claude is https://claude.ai/new?q=%s

I'm as anti-Google as anyone out there. I block all their ads, refuse to pay for youtube, go out of my way to avoid their hardware, etc. But I have to admit AI mode is great. It's fast, free, not yet cluttered with ads, and useful. I treat it as a search engine that does a fuzzy search rather than the more literal text match search that we're used to.

I recently bought a Bambu 3d printer after Reddit/HN drew my attention to them and AI mode has been really useful for me to learn about my new printer and troubleshoot things. There is so much information and I don't have time to read everything. I just want to ask a targeted question and have something summarize the literature's answers for it.

It will be a sad day when Google inevitably enshittifies it, but for now I'm happy for them to subsidize my expensive LLM queries.

"Surely the last time after handing out carrots long enough to kill all competition, they switched from carrots to sticks, that sucks; but look? now they started giving out carrots again!! It will be such a sad day when no more carrots"

“Someone’s handing out free carrots but it may be sticks someday so I’m gonna be mad about it today and grow my own carrots. That’ll show ‘em! My neighbor’s roasted carrots sure do smell good though.”

"I took their free carrots and now several years later, their carrots are a global ~monoculture that have been modified to grow faster but taste much worse. I don't like their carrots anymore but most other carrots are grown by small-scale local farms and can't be bought for cheap because the farmers never managed to get competitive economies of scale."

"I wish I'd supported the crazy folks who did carrot science in public and distributed seeds and allowed everyone to breed them so that we could all find better varieties for the common good! They still seem to be eating well."

(I see your very practical point, but I do think making the locally suboptimal choice in the hope of better long-term outcomes is a valid philosophical position.)

I also see the other side. I wish it wasn’t Google that currently has the best free product, because their well-oiled ad machine is going to inevitably turn the crank to find that sweet spot where the product is barely tolerable due to ads. But if I want free, fast, mostly correct lookups to plain English questions, what’s my alternative? Paying OpenAI or anthropic doesn’t seem to really change much. They’re going to do ads too. Abstain from AI entirely and continue to use non-AI Google search and take 10x as long to learn? Google still wins and I lose.

By which measure is the Google's free AI better than the one at DuckDuckGo? Happy user of the latter.

I'm the same way, I hate using Google search for searching because it's basically useless, and their other ecosystem offerings generally get enshittified over time so it's not worth paying for or relying on.

But if they're letting me using AI for free without logging in and I just need a dumb AI slop answer, then I'm more than happy to burn their tokens instead of my own. Any serious work goes to a different LLM provider. The switching cost for moving to a different LLM provider in the future is practically zero.

Google search feels so limited compared to Kagi. I discover so many more alternative resources when searching with Kagi.

> It's fast, free, not yet cluttered with ads

That was essentially how people praised Google in their early days. It certainly has ads now.

Not only does it have ads, they intentionally vandalized their engine so you'd give them more clicks.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

It takes me little more than a second to open a chat session with an AI. I spend way more time asking my question that pulling it up. All I have to do is type two characters in my address bar the browser knows which URL I want. That's like VI command speed. Two letters... <Enter>... the website loads within a second, the chat text box is focused and I make my request.

Me too. To be honest, I am not that interested in reading the first 5-10 search results to find what I am looking for. If Google can do that for me and summarize the main points, that's another 10 minutes of my life saved.

If you could use something like a ddg bang for it? like !chat at the end of the search and it goes to some router?

In DDG's case, searching with !ai sends it to duck.ai

You could get the same result from registering ChatGPT as a search provider in your browser.

If it didn't just make stuff up it would be even better!

try this:

  https://chatgpt.com/?q=how%20to%20decompress%20a%20tarball
  https://claude.ai/new?q=how%20to%20create%20a%20tarball

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