This is really funny to me because Google ruined their own search engine for advertising purposes; so much so that they now need to add "AI" to it to look good and hip again. Only if the "AI" results are actually good, it will hurt their advertising revenue, and it's not quite so simple to tweak it the same way they cooked their search algorithms to serve you more ads, plus it will burn an ungodly amount of money to process each request. And if it's bad, they'll have wasted billions on it and will ruin their reputation even worse.
Nah. It's not going to be "AI." It's going to be YouTube results, followed by Reddit results, followed by "Sponsored" results, followed by AI-written Bot results, then a couple pages of Amazon results and finally, on page 10 or so, a ten-year-old result that's probably no longer relevant.
Great. now the search engine will tell me "I am not designed to provide that information" when I don't use the specific, constantly changing magic words it wants.
This also reminds me that I'm still annoyed my phone options are more or less limited Android and iPhone.
I dislike this AI-first approach because it provides only a small selection of results that are influenced by the phrasing of the query. You can't just replace paginated results.
googles search results got so bad in the last few months that i switched to a searXNG instance and couldn't be happier at the moment. no profit incentive, so i get no-bullshit results. they can keep their SEO-infested AI garbage results.
There has never been a better time for someone to swoop in and remake web search. Hell, there are probably dozens of software engineers from Google that have direct experience with search AND were laid off.
I'm surprised that no one is trying to compete with Google at the weakest point it's been since going public.
Well it’s a step forward for efficiency at least. Now I can see the LLM generated crap straight it in the search page, rather than having to click through to an automated blogspam page.
If they are really going all-in on this, it almost feels like Google admitting defeat on search, having now been drown by the (partially self inflicted) deluges of SEO and now “AI”.
That future is apparently here: Google is starting to roll out “AI Overviews,” previously known as the Search Generative Experience, or SGE, to users in the US and soon around the world.
Reid ticks off a list of features aimed at making that happen, all of which Google announced publicly on Tuesday at its I/O developer conference.
It’s not really beneficial to add AI.” Where she figures Gemini can be most helpful is in more complex situations, the sort of things you’d either need to do a bunch of searches for or never even go to Google for in the first place.
(You hear this one a lot in AI because it can be tricky to wade through tons of same-y listings and reviews to find something actually good.)
With Gemini, she says, “we can do things like ‘Find the best yoga or pilates studio in Boston rated over four stars within a half-hour walk of Beacon Hill.’” Maybe, she continues, you also want details on which has the best offers for first-timers.
As AI has come for search, products like Perplexity and Arc have come under scrutiny for combing and summarizing the web without directing users to the actual sources of information.
The original article contains 995 words, the summary contains 203 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Kagi is a paid search engine. Yeah, sucks that we have to pay for good or decent search results, but... as the economic models of the internet change, we need to change with them. I've personally lost faith in freemium ad-supported websites in general.
Honestly, I've been using Bing a lot in recent months thanks to its integrated AI. Google is now just for when I know I want a specific web page, when it's a general answer I want then nothing beats Bing Chat. So this is a good move by Google.