AI Has Made Google Search So Bad People Are Moving to TikTok and Reddit

https://medium.com/bouncin-and-behavin-blogs/ai-has-made-google-search-so-bad-people-are-moving-to-tiktok-reddit-6ac0b4801d2e

by paulpauper • 2 years ago

66 36 2 years ago

medium.com

hunglee2• 2 years ago

SEO and Ads already made Google Search bad way prior to AI.

ac130kz• 2 years ago

Yet it wasn't that bad, all they had to do is use machine learning for obvious clones and malware detection.

letsSpy• 2 years ago

on the other hand, LLMs are often better then Google.

jsemrau2• 2 years ago

IMO, Google Search is a dead product. Not immediately maybe, but at least for 90% of my work, it has been replaced by Bing CoPilot and similar solutions.

I don't go look for images anymore, I just create new ones with ComfyUI. I don't query for Stackoverflow, I do code analysis with Starcoder. I don't check for lyrics or similar, I just use vanilla chatgpt it.

lionkor3• 2 years ago

I still use (duck duck go) search and ofc documentation to find what I need - in my kind of field (c++) AIs are terrible because the problems are pretty much never trivial.

Its not a dead product just because companies are selling you a solution that works better for you - it becomes a dead product once there is a better solution nearly everyone uses.

dontupvoteme• 2 years ago

What do you use for a ComfyUI config?

I got out of imagegen a while ago but it does seem pretty advanced compared to AUTOMATIC's original UI (and cloud imagegen is just derivative and inflexible..)

jsemrau2• 2 years ago

I like it for the workflow, easy configuration, and the drag-and-drop workflow rebuilding.

gipp• 2 years ago

I see this sentiment a lot on here, always with a vague intimation that it's a widespread thing. But it is just so far out of sync with the way I use search I just can't wrap my head around it.

You say 90% of you usage, but then describe the sorts of things that make up only a tiny fraction of mine. 90% of mine, maybe more, is just very quickly looking up basic facts. Was this the same actress from that other show? How many Xs to a Y? What was the exact wording of that quote and who said it? Where's that one store? I do this, I dunno, probably dozens? of times a day.

Are you saying you use it for that kind of purpose? I don't think I would trust any LLM's answers to those kinds of questions -- at least, not to exclusively handle all of them, on an ongoing basis. Even if it's only making up bullshit 5% of the time, after long enough that means I have no idea which 5% of my knowledge is wrong. Unless I'm double checking the information elsewhere, in which case what's the point?

Meanwhile Google still supplies the right answer for those simple, basic facts immediately like 99% of the time. A lot of the time right there in a snippet where I also instantly know the attribution. Even if we perfectly solved hallucination, the friction to get it from one of these chatbots is still so much higher. Harder to get to, so much slower.

PeterStuer• 2 years ago

While this might be true to some extend, Google screwed the pooch long before AI by selling out to their marketing team over user interests and satisfaction.

thatoneguy• 2 years ago

Yup, just like Boeing ditched the leadership steeped in engineering for leadership steeped in Excel.

toomuchtodo• 2 years ago

Racing over each other to win the Jack Welch Corporate Destruction Award.

kbos872• 2 years ago

This might be something of a technicality but I doubt it was their marketing team who is at fault. If it’s over-monetization of search results that you have a problem with as I do, it’s more likely to have been product leaders with aggressive monetization targets.

lionkor3• 2 years ago

The people saying LLMs are better than google: Say you turn off your internet, is a local LLM better than having a few MB of files (all of wikipedia, all of your language's and all packages' documentation, etc.) downloaded? Why is that not an approach youre taking?

_boffin_• 2 years ago

Who said it’s not. I’m trying to go in that direction

asddubs• 2 years ago

zeal is a good app for local documentation in times of no internet. it's not very good if you're not just looking up something you know the name of, though

lionkor3• 2 years ago

Oh yeah, I love Zeal. Also manpages can be nice, and ripgrep and fzf are good for searching local files

marcosdumay• 2 years ago

I'd really use an LLM where you kinda explain a concept and it gives you back all of the names and jargon linked to it.

The current crop of them were great at this for a few months. For some reason, they are not good anymore.

carlosjobim• 2 years ago

There's no reason why people are down voting your comment. Excellent software like Dash makes finding code documentation offline easy. You'll still need online search for things you're not regularly looking up, but offline resources would save a lot of time for people who habitually put everything into Google.

thefz• 2 years ago

Solving complex problems often means piecing together parts of a research to obtain an understanding of the issue. This any AI can't do. Chatbots are ok for trivial stuff.

postalrat2• 2 years ago

It wasn't AI that made google search bad. It was SEO and google's acceptance paywalled sites like linkedin showing google one document and visitors another document.

neonarray• 2 years ago

SEO was/is a good thing because it made search a lot better for many years. The real problem are the individuals gaming/abusing the hell out of the system. Add AI content to the mix and I do fear it's a problem that can't be sorted out by Google Search, at least as how we know it now.

It still has its uses and I personally still turn to it (well DuckDuckGo usually) to find specific things. But like all things, it's one tool that serves a certain purpose.

postalrat2• 2 years ago

I don't remember SEO ever making search better.

IshKebab• 2 years ago

Exactly. There's been a lot of easy to identify trash on Google for a very long time that they haven't bothered to deal with. I bet it's partly because they rely too much on metrics. "Oooo lots of people clicked on the clickbait! They must want more!"

Terr_2• 2 years ago

That was definitely a major factor in making things suck, but I don't think it (nor LLMs) were required for the rise of annoying content-farm sites.

kbos872• 2 years ago

I’ve been defaulting to Reddit for a long time and I’m shocked at how good search is on TikTok for the right topics. The fact that Google so prominently and commonly surfaces “[query] Reddit” as a suggested search says a lot.

okdood64• 2 years ago

What kind of searches are you doing on TikTok?

r9295• 2 years ago

Seems like a click-bait title as Google Search was long gone before the AI spam, as noted by several people. AI will just accelerate the toxicity of SEO

riku_iki• 2 years ago

Its not gone, because there is no much stronger replacement yet.

Terr_2• 2 years ago

[Recycled from related submission] For your amusement, a relevant music-video titled "The current state of search engines" [0]

    Yes, I know about the quotes
    I know about the dash and OR
    It's all ass
    Google doesn't work... Anymore

    I have to add the word "Reddit" 
    To every goddamn search to read 
    Content made by humans
    Google doesn't work... Anymore

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY

ChrisArchitect2• 2 years ago

Article from February 2024. Thanks OP

Clump it in with the twenty other posts about the same thing.

ChrisArchitect2• 2 years ago

Some more discussion then:

Ask HN: Why is Google search unusable lately?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39337118

Google search is losing the fight with SEO spam, study says

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39067949

Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search [pdf]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39013497

pentagrama• 2 years ago

For many searches I'm using Chat GPT now. No ads, cleaner, text only, I can ask follow up questions.

I can't ask (yet) what's the weather today or Champions League matches today. Also I know it might has errors, but Google Search first results are doubtful this days.

I look up some searches that I did on Chat GPT lately:

- Types of leucemia

- Miles davis discography

- Hour difference between Buenos Aires and Bogotá

- What's Romeo and Juliet is about

It is great to me. Besides TikTok and Reddit I will add Chat GPT to the Google Search list of current threats.

BLanen• 2 years ago

It's AI on GOOGLE'S END ITSELF that's making their product worse.

Search results are endlessly optimized for a mean, but everyone has some tail-end subject they want to search more specifically which google's search-AI just seems to get worse and worse with. (Here on HN it's coding/engineering/tech)

seoulmetro• 2 years ago

AI didn't make Google search bad. That's way, way off the mark. Google made Google search bad.

Lockal• 2 years ago

"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated"

* Google is declared dying, because SEO is invented

* Google is declared dying, because users add site:stackoverflow.com

* Google is declared dying, because users add site:reddit.com

* Google is declared dying, because an ambitious paid search engine is emerging

* Google is declared dying, because Bing adds AI, and Google does not

* Google is declared dying, because websites add AI-generated content

* Google is declared dying, because Google actually adds AI

<- you are here

tim333• 2 years ago

I was going to say on any HN thread about Google search the top comments are usually that it's all broken but it seems to work mostly fine for my purposes. OK it's not perfect but nothing is. Also if it's broken why does it have 90%+ share? I occasionally try other ones and they are worse in some ways. Even the sainted Kagi - I wanted to know something trivial and it wouldn't tell me without creating an account with name and email so I thought sod that and googled it.

It actually has some remarkably good features that it didn't in the early days. If you are looking for a physical place you can get reviews of it, a street view of the outside, travel directions and so on pretty easily.

I can recall being thwarted once in the last year or so when I was trying to figure what brand of tooth fillings I'd had and the search was filled with general dental info rather than filling brands which is more of a dental trade thing. ChatGPT was way better on that (was sonicfill). Apart from that mostly good.

AI Has Made Google Search So Bad People Are Moving to TikTok and Reddit

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