Google will start showing AI-powered search results for users who didn't opt-in

https://searchengineland.com/google-starts-testing-ai-overviews-from-sge-in-main-google-search-interface-438680

by microflash • 2 years ago

117 124 2 years ago

searchengineland.com

webkike• 2 years ago

I think this might be the tipping point for me to start looking for alternatives in the search engine space

dontreact• 2 years ago

I think there is probably the option to opt out of this feature, it's just that it will be on by default?

riku_iki5• 2 years ago

Maybe ad blockers will allow to hide this stuff

ttt3ts• 2 years ago

I would recommend https://github.com/searxng/searxng

One of my biggest gripes with Google search these days are it's bad UI. Started using searxng a few years ago when Google made everything above the fold useless videos, excessive whitespace, and dynamically poping content to accedently click.

throwup238• 2 years ago

I wonder if Kagi's implementation of the same feature influenced anyone at google or if this was an inevitable development. Google has been providing the AI answer boxes for years but it's never been very user driven.

With Kagi you can use !fast/!expert bangs to use one of several LLMs fed the top few search results or as of last month, just end the search query with a question mark (no affiliation just a happy customer). It's almost completely changed how I use search.

Maxion• 2 years ago

It's quite interesting what a search engine can be in 2024 when the product isn't the one using it, but the search results themselves.

Kagi with a wayy smaller budget than Google have really managed to make something pretty cool. Still does not replace google for 100% of my searches, but for the ones it does it is remarkably good, and so much less mentally taxing when working on a coding problem. I don't have to on top of everything manually filter search results, I can just click the top link.

ilaksh3• 2 years ago

Kagi uses the Google search API.

andy99• 2 years ago

I pay for Kagi, I'm only vaguely aware that they have AI features and I have no interest in using them. What I like is that it doesn't annoy me about that stuff or anything, it just lets me use it (kagi search) as I want. Completely different from aggressive big tech "you're the product" companies that use modal "got it?" popups to try and push features you don't want. I hope that doesn't change for Kagi more than anything else.

Also, I rarely use search to answer questions and anyway would never just trust an answer. I even read SO before pasting in the code and decide if it fits with what I'm doing and what modifications the answer may need, I guess I'm old. But more importantly, I use "search" mostly to get to pages I know exist or expect to exist. And getting to the right page faster is what I care about, not any answer.

frizlab• 2 years ago

I pay for Kagi and was similarly only vaguely aware that they have AI features and I had no interest in using them.

I started adding a question mark to my query out of curiosity and their instant answers are really good. Also they have links to their references, which I often check to verify the answer.

littlecranky67• 2 years ago

You should try Kagi's FastGPT [0]. You need not trust the answer, as it gives the URL sources for each paragraph to verify yourself.

[0]: kagi.com/fastgpt

codetrotter• 2 years ago

Google has been on a mission for years to stop letting users click through to other sites.

They started with the info boxes that extracted info from sites so you don’t have to click and read.

This is just a natural evolution of that.

jeffbee4• 2 years ago

People don't want to click through, they want their question answered.

radicality• 2 years ago

Can also hit ‘q’ to show the Quick Answer feature if you forgot the question mark.

Love this feature too, especially the references! I end almost all my queries with a question mark now.

tayo42• 2 years ago

Do the swe/people actually doing the implementation of this really think llms are ready to be used like this and won't just piss off and turn people against "ai"

What chat gpt did was interesting, in hindsight I think it was a mistake calling it ai.

geitir• 2 years ago

At least google will still walk back on things when they truly suck. Recent example is where they replaced the default Shopping, Images, Videos tabs when you search for something with autogenerated suggestions. It was awful. But, even though it took them a few months, that entire change seems to be reverted.

neximo64• 2 years ago

This is actually a nice feature, why would I need to opt in to it?

riku_iki5• 2 years ago

Some people don't trust current quality of AI

kleiba• 2 years ago

Well, the way I see it, you shouldn't really trust any information that's out there on the internet. It's your own responsibility to put search results into perspective, whether it's someone's blog or AI generated content.

impulser_• 2 years ago

Yeah, but this is essentially the same as Google results now but instead of just links it uses AI to summarize the results into a text blob. It still contains links to where it got it information in the summary and it allows you to ask follow up questions.

It's not like it generating new information. It just summarizes information based on the same links you would have gotten without it.

blendergeek• 2 years ago

It's not the quality of the AI that's at issue. In fact the higher quality Google's AI is, the less I will trust it. Google wants to extract maximum value from me. I want to find useful information on the Internet. These two goals are frequently at odds with each other. The better Google's AI gets, the better it will be at doing it's job (which I do not like).

habitue2• 2 years ago

Sure, but do we trust Google's non generative summaries / search results for some reason? It's all a black box to us on the outside. It's already heavily ML'ed, like at no point was a human ranking these things or determining relevance

xnx• 2 years ago

Surprised to see negative reactions to this. Generated search results that distill actual content are definitely better than blogspam that has only a few useful tidbits in thousands of words and dozens of huge ad blocks.

imp0cat• 2 years ago

It sure must have looked like an easy way to combat blogspam to some manager.

However, seems to me that distilled blogspam is still a blogspam.

kevin_thibedeau• 2 years ago

As soon at the Doubleclick CTR drops they'll be reversing this change like they did on the recent change to stop profiling anonymous YouTube users.

hackerlight• 2 years ago

It's basically Perplexity which is a very good product. Google is on the money here.

dylan604• 2 years ago

so search is no longer a result of links to a page where information is found. search is now just an answer to a question. I don't really have a problem as that's what people really want. what I do have an issue with is that the people that put time/energy/effort into providing the information that Google has taken to train their data service get no credit or any attempt at being rewarded for their effort. sure, they might still provide links to SEO crap sites to make it "feel" like web search. this is just the latest of steps to remove the ability to actually finding a website.

to me, this should be a totally separate product. the Googs Answer All 5000(TM) will just give the answer to whatever is being asked with no method of inspecting the validity of the answer.

gentleman11• 2 years ago

Instead of visiting content creators or information sources directly, you allow google to insert themselves between you and them. The sources get starved and google later has the opportunity to shape what is said to influence you (ie, “advertise” in a more varied way, or else give a political spin or some pro corporate or PR approved way)

see also: amazons ai review summarizer will one day have a larger role and will surely skew things to increase sales

lukev3• 2 years ago

The quality of these results is in my experience quite poor, so this is worrying to me. (The other comment about "distilled blogspam" hits the nail on the head I think.)

It highlights a fundamental tension around Google's core product: Users want accurate information. From their perspective, that is the singular purpose of using Google. But Google's internal purpose is only to sell ads. It makes no difference to their bottom line whether the information they give users is correct unless it gets so bad they start losing ad impressions.

Speaking even more broadly, it's very depressing to me how secondary the goal of building a good, useful or functional thing is subservient or at best orthogonal to the goal of making money.

cmrdporcupine3• 2 years ago

Best monthly purchase I make now is Kagi.

Replaced our Netflix membership with it.

Recommend so you don't need to be worried by what Google does with your search.

StressedDev2• 2 years ago

Yup - I do not use Kagi but Kagi's incentive is to make the best search engine. Google's incentive to make the best ad impressions engine.

freedomben5• 2 years ago

I disagree, I think (especially as evidenced by Gemini) Google's people has a specific mission to make the world a better place, and "better" being defined by them such as ensuring that DEI is injected into everything. I am generally very supportive of diversity, but I think it's pretty clear that the goals of helping you find information and the goals of filtering/shaping that information to make the world more reflective of what they think it should be, are fundamentally in tension. That is what concerns me the most.

lukev3• 2 years ago

I do not believe anyone with real power at Google values liberal values above revenue. The RLHF and fine-tuning is solely to prevent news articles of the form "Google unveils new shockingly racist AI!!", which is absolutely what would happen without explicit fine-tuning, and which would invite regulation and scrutiny.

I too think artificially "fixing" models is the wrong way to go. If the models are biased towards racism it's because the training data is biased towards racism which is because society is biased towards racism. Which is true, and we'd be better served by acknowledging that and shining a light on it. Just ban AI (as a known tainted product) from being used for making any decisions of importance.

lukev3• 2 years ago

Separately: we should be careful of carrying the right wing's water and adopting terms like "DEI" as negatives without thinking critically about it.

This is straight out of the Chris Rufo playbook; identify a well-intentioned but possibly flawed concept, create a caricature of it, and make that strawman the punching bag of every anti-inclusive political voice. Then, because it's a term liberals were already using, turn around and use it to attack existing institutions.

This is his explicit strategy for kneecapping "CRT" (formerly an academic subfield), "woke" (a social concept among American Blacks), and you can see it unfolding in real time against "DEI" (formerly the way HR departments tried to comply with the Civil Rights act, but now a catch-all negative term.)

StressedDev2• 2 years ago

RE: "Speaking even more broadly, it's very depressing to me how secondary the goal of building a good, useful or functional thing is subservient or at best orthogonal to the goal of making money."

This is what happens when things are "free". They have to make money somehow and "free" products typically have bad incentives (i.e. the company puts making money ahead of making the best product). One of the nice things about paying for news, TV (not cable, streaming), software, etc. is you are the customer and they company's continued survival depends on making you happy. In the short term, they can can do all sorts of crappy things to their customers (think Cable TV's high prices and meh content), but in the long term, bad behavior kills companies.

jeffbee4• 2 years ago

I've had these enabled since launch and I think they are great. It usually provides 2-3 stanzas of summary, each with a carousel of sources. It's a useful format because in a ranked list it is not always immediately obvious when there are multiple classes of results, the union of which answers your question. With the summary result, the correspondence between sources and relevant facts in more obvious.

divbzero• 2 years ago

Bing has also included AI-powered search results since last year: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/02/07/reinventing-sear...

rchaud2• 2 years ago

What was the final edition of Encarta Encyclopedia? 2009? Might have to go back to the old ways of doing things.

ilaksh3• 2 years ago

This could be considered a new era for the internet. Or whenever it starts being used to serve the majority of search results.

People who are skeptical of AI won't like it of course. But it will be a literal and practical change to the way the majority of internet searches work.

Google basically becomes the de facto personal agent for most people at that point. I would not be surprised to see Google Assistant merge into the main search product.

Microsoft had actually been strategic by promoting Copilot.

I know that many HNers generally hate Blockchain and smart contracts and decentralized technologies, but I feel this direction is the only viable alternative to monopoly platforms that are now even more directly acting as our interface to the world via agents.

Exactly what that looks like I don't know. But I do know it involves open protocols and probably open marketplaces for knowledge and other types of tasks.

mateo1• 2 years ago

Who will write pages for google to summarize from now on? This will kill the last bits of remaining organic content creators on the internet.

bugglebeetle• 2 years ago

If Google was smart, they would use their existing ranking systems to find the highest quality creators and pay them to do this. Instead, they’ll probably train an LLM on SEO’d blogspam and call it a day.

xanderlewis• 2 years ago

People who are skeptical of AI won't like it of course.

Very few (if any) are sceptical of ‘AI’. They are usually sceptical (and rightly so) of LLMs. They’re very different things.

lolinder2• 2 years ago

I know that many HNers generally hate Blockchain and smart contracts and decentralized technologies

Whoa, slow down. There's definitely a lot of skepticism about blockchain and smart contracts around here, but that skepticism does not generalize to decentralization as a whole. Self-hosters are strongly represented on here, as are proponents of federated tech and P2P.

There's specifically a lot of skepticism about blockchain and web3 on HN, and I'm really curious to know how you think those specific decentralized technologies are going to make a difference in the search space.

fumar• 2 years ago

I've been using both ChatGPT and Gemini for months as my primary question-seeking-response portals. I find Gemini to provide more relevant and recent responses while ChatGPT provides slightly more thorough code guidance. For me, LLMs are a shortcut to researching information where I am hoping to find one or two sources which answer the majority of my questions. Now, I can chat and reason through my questions in one thread without navigating to other sources. The biggest pitfall is surfacing differing perspectives but I think that is solvable.

kibwen• 2 years ago

I categorically do not want an LLM regurgitating answers at me.

What I want is a librarian, who can sift through the impossibly vast oceans of information and point me at resources that are relevant to my query.

spdif899• 2 years ago

As others have mentioned in nearby threads, Kagi has some good examples of this in action. Appending a question mark to your query will run a GPT model to interpret and summarize the results, providing sources for each reference so that you can read through in more detail. It's way less "trust me bro" than google and feels more like a research assistant.

therealdrag06• 2 years ago

Why not? A librarian leaves you with more work to do. An LLM is an assistant that adapts the information to your specific scenario saving you work.

brink• 2 years ago

Let me choose how much work is enough for me. I don't need an LLM wiping my butt, and I enjoy reading the filtered results; not all work is bad.

namaria• 2 years ago

An LLM is not an assistant. It's a tool that will fill up the gaps with plausible sounding content. If it happens to have a lot of data on what you're looking for in its training good. If not, you SOL, risking being fooled by confidence.

yosame• 2 years ago

I feel like context is far more important than the actual answer.

If you want to develop your skills, it's just as important to be aware of the things that aren't the answer, rather than just a single hyper-specific curated answer.

pavel_lishin2• 2 years ago

Or it'll flat out hallucinate information.

7ewis• 2 years ago

Is SGE any good? Would love to try it, but I'm in the UK. Did try enabling it with a VPN a few months ago without any luck.

Socnic• 2 years ago

The problem with that is that Google, now more then ever, can show you whatever they want. Another step toward being just a dumb TV. (AKA propaganda engine)

habitue2• 2 years ago

Didn't opt in? Since when do we get to opt into a tech company's product changes?

I get that generative AI is the latest terrible thing, but this seems like a normal product rollout to me

bionhoward• 2 years ago

“You may not use the Services to develop machine learning models or related technology.”

If these start showing up on ML searches, I’m going to troll them HARD.

paxys• 2 years ago

Google has been showing "AI-powered" search results for well over a decade now.

1024core2• 2 years ago

I was writing some Python code (not my primary language), and wanted to know if there was something built into f-strings that would nicely wordwrap the output.

I did a Google search for "how can I create f-strings in python so the output is wrapped at some fixed length". Except, for Google, I did not use the "how do I" etc. and just threw some keywords at it: "python f-string wrapping", "python f-string folding", etc.

All I got back was various results on how to wrap f-strings themselves.

Frustrated, I typed "how can I create f-strings in python so the output is wrapped at some fixed length" into ChatGPT, and back came the answer: ... However, f-strings themselves don't provide a built-in method for wrapping text at a specific width. ... For text wrapping, you can use the textwrap module ... Here's how you can combine f-strings with the textwrap module to achieve text wrapping: ... (followed by a full example).

I think "Search" will be changing dramatically over the next year or two. And websites which depend on Search traffic to survive will be in deep trouble.

jeffbee4• 2 years ago

The double standard here is hilarious. The ChatGPT result you got is better largely because you typed in a longer search doc. The illusion of superiority that surrounds ChatGPT is significantly due to the human factors curiosity that people are willing to type in a long-ass search string in the conversational context. They will type "best pants" into Google then complain about the futility of it, then switch tabs and spend ten minutes writing a short essay on pants for ChatGPT, and rave about the results.

If you take the entire quoted search sentence from your third paragraph, then Google also presents a complete solution.

slifin• 2 years ago

I feel like Google has trained this behaviour into its long time users

Previously writing human like sentences would not yield good results

Now its more like <key word> <key word> reddit

danaris• 2 years ago

I...think you may be misreading them?

They said that they put exactly the same queries into Google as ChatGPT.

dataflow2• 2 years ago

If you take the entire quoted search sentence from your third paragraph, then Google also presents a complete solution.

Which one is the complete solution you're seeing here? https://www.google.com/search?q=how+can+I+create+f-strings+i...

partiallypro• 2 years ago

I think "Search" will be changing dramatically over the next year or two. And websites which depend on Search traffic to survive will be in deep trouble.

Yes, and no. A lot of sites generate crap content as it is. Not all search queries are just questions that can be answered, some are looking for businesses, shopping items, legal help, etc things that ChatGPT, etc can't emulate. AI will hurt sites like Reddit/StackOverflow/Quora, etc which answer -actual- questions. The issue is that once that happens there will be less and less content to solve random issues and ChatGPT, etc will not have been trained on them creating a bit of a gap. Then couple that with all the junk AI articles people will be publishing, it will be increasingly more difficult to solve minor issues that you randomly come across.

ChatGPT/Midjourney, etc right now is just feeding into the "Dead Internet." I'd say currently, on net, it has been more of a bad thing than a good thing. That may change, or it could get worse.

vineyardmike• 2 years ago

some are looking for businesses, shopping items, legal help, etc things that ChatGPT, etc can't emulate.

Except it can. It doesn’t have to try and “remember” the details in its weights, it can RAG and all sorts of fun tricks. As Google’s Search Generative Experience shows, LLM interfaces don’t have to be strictly chat. These tools surface and aggregate existing content, instead of hallucinating new ones. It can’t stop people from pasting generated content into Reddit, but it can be used for actual search.

Imagine just asking ChatGPT (or more likely, Gemini) for “space heater recommendations for a 300sqft office in a shed” and having the LLM walk you through the options - you no longer need to use a UI to toggle filters, and you don’t need to explicitly throw keywords into a search bar and hope you picked the right ones.

Regarding the “dead internet” - you’ll always have humans create new content. People wanna talk about their interests on Reddit. That won’t change. People will file bug reports and new code in GitHub. Companies will post support articles. Journals will publish research papers. These “good” sources will still exist because there are external reasons to. The only thing that will die are the SEO crap now that they’re really not special.

yashasolutions• 2 years ago

As a side note, "Search" outside of google is changing too. I have been using Kagi for a few month now, my search experience is so much better since then.

KolmogorovComp• 2 years ago

Side-question but relevant (wanted to do an Ask HN about it for a while).

I have a relatively large corpus (~10k pages), and would like to augment traditional keyword search with AI. Eg: write my question and get an LLM answer *backed-up* by search and linking to the part of the corpus used.

What are my options here? Local option would be best.

Noumenon72• 2 years ago

I use the same Google account at work and home but only got AI-powered results at work, making me wonder what else Google does differently when you connect from a favored IP.

yoyopa• 2 years ago

I don't want to search. I want to filter your ridiculously large database to find certain information.

vicnov• 2 years ago

I would have been on board with it, if I didn’t get a completely wrong AI generated response from Google the other day.

I was for some reason looking into history of Reddit and ended up searching “what happened to former AMA coordinator Victoria Taylor”. Google AI summary got confused and told me that she got fired because hundreds of redditors voted for her ouster (clearly mixing up Victoria’s story and Ellen Pao’s)

I know n=1, but feels like maybe a little too early to get it out of the experimental mode.

__loam• 2 years ago

I think this points to bigger issues with the AI field generally with respect to adoption and development. The output of these systems is fundamentally unverifiable. Building a system to verify these answers would be orders of magnitude more expensive and maybe computationally impossible. It looks really impressive because it's 95% of the way there, but 5% error rate is atrocious, in was expensive to get this far, and improving it much more will be more and more expensive. What we've essentially built is a search engine that is 5 times more expensive to operate and that alienates the content from its context, which makes it less valuable.

Maybe it's good enough for programming since you can immediately verify the output but I suspect we're pretty far away from the breakthroughs ai boosters insist we are mere months away from. We've had some form of self driving for a while now and the other company that seems close is waymo, and that seems to have taken over a decade of huge research and capital expenditures.

huytersd• 2 years ago

It’s actually working pretty well. I’m usually am satisfied by the AI response atleast 50% of the time.

Google will start showing AI-powered search results for users who didn't opt-in

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