Hacker News Reader

Comment by fhub | Hacker News Reader

My father is 75. He often says with a smile, “Let’s just Google AI it.” The smile is because he thinks he’s cutting edge. He hasn’t been cutting edge for 30 years, but Google has made AI so accessible through his existing search habit.

I imagine their retention data through this uncanny valley transition is very good.

View on HN

It genuinely makes some searches that were impossible, possible. I was looking for a website that had a similar name and character to another but had an adjective at the start, I had forgotten the name. I just searched something to the effect of "site similar to X but has an adjective that starts with A" and it actually found what I wanted.

Literally impossible before. When it works it's like magic.

My experience with similar queries has been tortuous, usually punctuated with long gaslighting campaigns in the form of "<thing you described> has never existed, you are probably thinking of <some idiotic totally unrelated thing>", which require a fair amount of fighting to get it back on track. Sometimes it eventually surfaces the thing I am looking for, but I often think I would have gotten to it faster by brute forcing traditional searches. Especially if we were in a search era where the traditional results were actually useful.

I remember my friend’s dad saying proudly how his computer came with Microsoft Copilot, back when the branding had only existed for like 6 months at most.

"He hasn’t been cutting edge for 30 years, but Google has made AI so accessible through his existing search habit."

Maybe his smile is because he remembers how crappy search was 30 years ago.

Dogpile is still around. https://www.dogpile.com/

It's pushed me away from nearly all google products and subscriptions, but I wonder about other people, as I'm not a typical user. The times I do go to google out of habit or DDG is providing its atrocious results, it never understands the intent and hallucinates half the time on top

I've since given my agent access to Exa, Tavily, and SearXNG so it can filter through today's low quality search results for me, search as we knew it is dead. I don't mind paying either if it leads to more alignment with my providers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com