I don't want my search engine to think for me
searchzee.com
searchzee.com
I've heard of people taking old writings from 30 years ago, feeding it to an AI detector, and being told "this is AI"
The subheadings for example "The summary is not the answer" and "The verification problem is real and it compounds" are typical being punchy but not really making much sense.
Also consider
>This is slower. That's real. It's more work. And it is, in practice, more accurate — because accuracy in information retrieval is a function of reading, not of being read to.
The over punchy - It's this. It's that. It's the other - is typical or LLMs. The accuracy being a function of reading not being read to doesn't really make sense - with both normal results and AI you are reading.
etc.
It's one of the few AI features, despite still being shoved in my face, that I actually find useful.
With that said, the worst thing is how search results have degraded significantly since the AI years, even before they added the actual "AI mode."
Google now (and quite a few search features on other services, e.g., Twitter) often returns results that have ZERO relationship to the search keywords I gave -- like an entirely different person when searching for a person's name, which I think should never happen and did not happen when search was still based on a "rigid" algorithm of indexed content. So, I can only assume it's because they have some AI thingy along the process.
Also, Google Search's AI answer doesn't prevent the actual search results from still showing below; so if I later realize I need those (search results) instead, they're already there.
Also, I use browsers all the time, so typing things into the location bar is quicker than deliberately opening the Gemini app/website or whatever.
I value one fewer click/action a lot when such an action will be performed hundreds of times a day.
OTOH if I'm looking up an answer to a tax question, I don't just immediately trust the first answer from AI mode. I use it more as a knowledgeable friend who is not a tax attorney and so cannot be 100% trusted, but he/she is giving me useful pointers to go do deeper research and arrive at an answer.
For me the basic process means typing more, reading a needlessly verbose answer, and then half the time finding out it was wrong anyway.
I left google for chagpt/claude, but have slowly been coming back because these results have become rather useful -- especially when google inspects actual video content to produce replies. This is one of the best outcomes of the AI wave for me: content which was locked away in YouTube videos and forced me to consume it sequentially (without power-reading as I do with articles) is now indexed in search results in some AI summary. It makes mistakes, but it lets me figure out the right videos to watch, and often gives me enough context to find the solution myself. This applies to work, but also to something as simple as game walkthroughs!
As with everything, you need to know when to trust and when to doubt, when to iterate on chat (or chat with it with a smarter assistant like ChatGPT/claude). Hasn't it always been this way (minus the chat)?
I don't understand why people seem to be under this idea that just because it's at the top of a search results page it must be entirely correct, when we have spent decades knowing that you can't trust what's on the internet and you need to have critical thinking. Were you blindly trusting your first-page google results? What about when Wikipedia was starting, were you also trusting it blindly? Do you trust it blindly now?
In fact, when google started stealing the content of websites to display it, wasn't it already producing largely incorrect results because so many hits were SEO-garbage or outdated? (Not that we don't need to address the fact that this steals traffic from websites -- but it's a problem that PREDATES AI and absolutely still needs to be addressed somehow)
I can understand it if they believe the average joe will be more likely to blindly trust this, but that's an education problem -- and one we already had and has perhaps been compounded.
The visceral hate for a a life-changing technology that enables us to do more, faster, never ceases to amaze me. I'm growing so tired of it around my inner circles.
I get that there is a real bubble with real overhype and that some companies are profiting from it and shoving it down everyone's throats. I get that your actual life is worse because of this (you are forced to use shit models to produce more features while being paid the same). I get that maybe your job might change, and that for some people they will actually need to job-hop. This all absolutely sucks and it is a problem for many people, I get that! But that doesn't make the technology as a whole terrible, much less a bunch of its amazing applications. It's this constant wave of negativity, like nothing good will ever come out of AI and we're all doomed to be cornered by the big evil corporations that will run us dry.
It's hard to be rational when you're overcome with emotion and fear, I know, but it's so aggravating to have to interact with someone who can only see the technology itself as negative.
Now all the junk comes to the top and the sites you get all have ads and modal popups or sales funnel flows
It's SEO's fault that Google frequently prioritizes giving you results that are semantically or thematically related but ultimately irrelevant to what you searched for.
It's SEO's fault that Google refuses to place ads on websites not full of meandering irrelevant "content".
It's SEO's fault Google search all-but-ignores most single-purpose tool websites.
It's not the result of decisions made by Google's programmers and project managers - it's allllll the fault of SEO!
The SEO industry definitely isn't an all-purpose scapegoat for horribly unpopular decisions made by human beings at Google.
> When you search for something, you're usually not looking for a sentence. You're looking for evidence.
There is a long and storied history of Google offering more than just a list of links to go search for, since at least 2012, because a massive amount of people literally are looking for the single answer to a question, whether stated explicitly or implicit in the search term.
That said, I DO sometimes prompt explicit web searches via LLM because for certain searches, an LLM can be the best tool for the job. It's almost always cases where it's hard to target terms with inclusions, exclusions and booleans (even if Google hadn't partially nerfed them). This is usually due to English language ambiguities in word meaning and LLMs are actually ideal for that because they already have discrete tokens for "Wear" (as in clothes) and "Wear" (as in tires).
My conflict with Google product managers arises because I'm an advanced search user and I know when an LLM is the best tool for a search and when it's not. And when it's not, LLM results are always cognitive noise that just gets in the way and eats screen-space. I understand that most users may not be able to reliably make that distinction but Google refuses to offer any option for users like me to enable a functional experience, even buried in an advanced menu.
I don't think this gap is just monetization driven. I've worked as a senior group PM in a FAANG-ish tech company and I suspect the problem is related to a deeper issue I saw in many UX designers and product managers - an inability to accurately model the frequency and quantity of ways "automatic" or default options can fail to serve users. It's an insidious issue because it tends to appear as the absence of signal in normal interface usage analytics. And it's hard to detect in focus group and observational studies, unless you aggressively look for it. And they usually don't because there's an innate bias pushing them toward believing the automatic "it just works" solution serves everyone as well as they've designed it to. They insist it must be right because it's exactly the sort of elegant, simple solution their D-School profs graded highly.
The example given is you want evidence from an original source in Stack Overflow. So instead of just typing a few keywords and digging through pages, your query needs to ask Google exactly what you want and the format you want it in. If that’s a list of Stack Overflow pages, then that’s what you ask for. You can test this out now with AI summaries and a well-written query.
The quality of your results is going to depend on what you put into it. It will probably be annoying for some at first but for those that get it it’s going to be a step up.
The "quality" of your prompt is irrelevant when you're feeding it to something that just imagines things.
That's ridiculous. There isn't a learning curve, we don't want AI. No amount of "learning" is going to make these misbegotten features into something that actually improves my experience with the product. You should listen to people, not assume that you know their desires better than they do.
"Clicking through now feels like expressing distrust in the tool, rather than just doing your homework."
This is off. Just between us, the "AI" does not have feelings. It does not care if you express distrust in it.
I'm genuinely scared for a generation of people who've offshored their thinking, planning and creativity muscles to a few tech companies.
We think we're gaining an edge but we're really participating in a mind control experiment thats optimized to benefit those companies, not us as individual.
Miss me with AI, it will break your brain and start to control more and more of your behavior if you let it. Don't become a drone. You're not going to become some crazy productive SaaS founder becauae you have AI, you'll become a drone who's competency is 1:1 correlated to the quality and quantity of tokens you have access too/
We have AI now and it's doing a mostly incredible job getting us ANSWERS, not SEARCH LINKS. Trying to pretend that links are better is just trying to copy with rapid change.
Quite honestly I'm shocked that Google keeps making more money with search ads because I don't search anymore, I get answers directly from it or ChatGPT without clicking on any links.
If you feel that it's better, you are free to use it. Leave the rest of us, who think AI is bad at finding information and want to search, in peace so we can work the way we like. I don't think that's an unreasonable expectation: you can work the way you like, and I can work the way I like.
It's kinda nice actually.
But seriously, its actually nicer... and the equations on the back covers don't randomly change to crap every fourth time you open the book.
Here's a relevant example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44142113
-ai
Great points..
If I need a chatbot I'll launch the app. Mixing the AI answers in SERP is too much noise for me.
companies deliberately obscure some information and it helps.
how much does "<product>" cost
what is the phone number for "<company>"
It's up to you, the human, to decide what path you get the information and how to digest it and use it. I use LLMs for 99% of my "querying" these days because 99% of the information I'm looking for is either verifiable (coding) or low-stakes (how to do low-risk DIY house thing).
If I need actual search, I use Kagi. Otherwise, Claude has taken 99.8% of what Google used to do for me and it feels better than ever.