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Comment by ipdashc | Hacker News Reader

> These people are downright pleased with Google's AI summaries.

Consider me part of "those people", I guess, but are you guys not, at this point? There was a period near the start where they were bad, but I find them perfectly usable now. I'll often open a tab, Google something, and just read the summary because it's basically instant and I don't need any more than just that, a summary.

I'm genuinely confused why people take so much issue with them. Sure they're still wrong sometimes, but it's blatantly obvious when that's the case, and I can just scroll past.

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They're ok. But when I use a search engine it's because I want search results. If I wanted an LLM's interpretation I'd have just asked a search-enabled LLM in the first place.

True, but I find it's significantly faster than even "instant" chatgpt, and comes with the advantage that if the summary isn't what I need, I can just scroll down to see the real results (granted, which are usually useless these days).

I agree they should make them disable-able though.

> If I wanted an LLM's interpretation I'd have just asked a search-enabled LLM in the first place.

When you search on Google now that’s exactly what you’ve done.

Right, that's the problem I'm describing.

I rarely ever want to search. Searching is a means to an end, which is finding a piece of information, an answer. Whenever I'm scrolling through sites on Google Search, I'm just wasting my time filtering out misses. With Gemini and other AIs, I go straight to the answer and request a link (if not provided automatically) if I really want to check the source.

eh why would you check the source, who bother with minor things like that these days :)

Yeah, as someone used to searching for specific turns of phrase, having the query automatically interpreted as a question is quite annoying - for looking up song lyrics, game walkthroughs and articles by quotes I want a page list, not a summary

There's a RAM crisis on, you know, let me save you the compute!

Web search and a chatbot AI are two vastly different interfaces with different aims.

At this point, with a mature Web and a mature toolbox, I know a lot of research tools and resources that I can tap before I get out the sledgehammer of Search or LLM. So, if I know a priori that it won't work to plug a term into Wikipedia, or Wiktionary, or YouTube or something, then I can choose Gemini or Google Search.

If I go to Search, then my query means "I want to find external links and find a resource to research this term". If I go to Gemini, that means that the term is probably out of my wheelhouse, and/or I really want to delve in for some insight about this term, and I probably do not want to poke 3rd-party sites about it.

The trouble is that Google sort of melds them into the same-same, either way I choose. It wastes resources and browser-page-real-estate on that AI summary that I've got to skip and sift through the Search misses. The LLM still insists on a RAG web search and refer me to some dumb links that I didn't want.

Google was famed for its fast searches and rapid results. They used to be good results. But today it's obvious why everyone let Search products decay into garbage: because LLMs were coming, and LLMs are going to supplant your standard searches anyway.

yeah i'm genuinely baffled by this too. I read this attitude frequently and I'm tending towards the conclusion that its simply a loud minority of people. I don't know anyone who acts like this in real life.

How is an LLM summary really any worse than reading through random blogs, forum posts, or reddit? Those are somehow so much more reliable? If you want authority it gives you links, and if you don't find good enough links you can ask it a follow up--no need to be coy--just straight up ask it for more authoritative sources and it will usually surface them. It's so blazingly fast relative to doing genuine naive search, I really don't see the downside.

> How is an LLM summary really any worse than reading through random blogs, forum posts, or reddit?

For me it's that I find LLM prose annoying to read through, so if it's anything I want to really sit down and learn about, I prefer a proper blog/forum/etc writeup. But yeah, for quick summaries it kinda does just work at this point, fairly reliably and rapidly. I'm pretty confused by the attitude as well.

have you ever done the fun trick of asking any model to adversarially review itself? highly recommended practice for anyone who trusts a one-shot output

Sure, I've done this for more complicated questions and sometimes it reveals flaws. But I don't use Google for anything complicated. Generally it's just to get a quick vague definition of a term, pretty much.

is that functionally different than just using the search field in dictionary.com? I guess I'm just not seeing what the point of using Gemini is over a much more efficient feature that already exists

Sorry, I misspoke there. I do occasionally use it for outright word definitions (and in that case I find it more useful than, say, dictionary.com because my search bar defaults to it, it usually defaults to the most common definition, and it puts it in more easily-readable terms) but I more so meant that I'll use it for quick inquiries, often just to get a sense of what a thing is. For instance, some random recent searches:

  - cloudflare workers free tier
  - tubular lock
  - hasl finish
  - js null coalesce

For all of these it gives a perfectly acceptable result. So does the top search result, and if I want more info I'll click through to it, but it does the job of a summary just fine.

I'm not saying it's the best thing in the world, I'm just generally surprised by the amount of people that seem to hate it. It seems to do its job fine for me.

yeah, I think some of the vitriol is well-meaning but misplaced. when I think about the externalized costs (pollution, energy use, water use, rare earth mining, data center buildouts, etc) I think it's worthwhile to remain critical but people like to extend it, in their black and white thinking, as multi-categorical failures. for basic questions it's serviceable (though the number of responses that cite just Youtube videos means my skepticism for its output validity remains)

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