I understand why they are doing this. My Google search usage is easily down 50%+. I doubt I am unique here.
While there are times where I want pure search (Kagi, Old Google) I mostly use LLMs to search now and have them provide me links for source data.
When I do use LLMs as a search engine I always want it integrated into my AI workflows with access to tools and scripts etc. I never want to have a conversation with a website that is geared towards advertising me products.
I'm not at all in the same boat as you; I do not and likely will never primarily rely on LLMs for information. But it's fascinating to hear that even folks who do don't find this approach useful.
I think LLMs are better at finding the most helpful sources now, but that's more a testament to how much the front page of web search has lost to low value LLM content.
I'm not jumping in with both feet, either, but "never" is a very big word.
"Primarily" is the other key there. I'll use it from time to time with sources. But it's not first-line acceptable.
> I never want to have a conversation with a website that is geared towards advertising me products.
yeah man good thing LLMs are structurally incapable of being incentivized to sell you a product or render referral links, this is surely future-proof
That’s the thing… sure, this new search will be useful at times.
But I still want to also be able to do my normal, old school searching.
I don't trust facts from LLMs. When I am searching for something, I usually want to find primary sources. As soon as a number is involved, I do my best to not even look at the AI output.
Even though the result is often good and combines information from multiple sources, it can also get things wrong by combining information from different eras or just plain outdated advice. AFAICT, without primary sources, the result is for entertainment purposes only.
You can ask them to cite their sources. It's very good practice to do so, and to check those sources, because I've found that about 30-40% of the time their source doesn't support their answer at all.
If it's wrong 2 out of 5 times, why even waste your time going to it in the first place? That's a massive failure rate.
All of Google AI Mode is sourced.
Yes, and those sources often contradict the AI summary if you follow them (or if you know anything about the topic).
Objecting to this from the user end seems a bit like complaining the original Google was trying to be too magic when what you wanted was AltaVista. This has been the inevitable direction the whole time.
The real problem here is assuming this takes off what incentives will anyone have to provide the information to feed the beast?
>Objecting to this from the user end seems a bit like complaining the original Google was trying to be too magic when what you wanted was AltaVista. This has been the inevitable direction the whole time.
Did AltaVista get replaced by the owner of the site to justify a giant investment?
Exactly, why should sites give free bandwidth to the google bots hammering them for nothing in return? Outside of retail, there's no point in allowing google to crawl if you're not getting anything in return.
Also, as a user, I want websites written by real humans. I do not want generic LLM output always has the same boring style. I like human writing, perfectly native English, broken second language English, I don't care. Human writing is unique and makes reading a pleasure.
Of course, even Google the search engine has gotten worse at surfacing interesting websites. First came the SEO spam websites, now the slop websites.
I'm glad that alternatives like Kagi exist.
Kind of Google to create a market opening for its competitors like this. I hope Kagi, Bing, and DuckDuckGo are taking notes.
I'm sure there's a niche for a product for search nerds. Something that leans into inverted indexes like the classic Lexis/Nexis search. But it's got to have Google-like coverage.
Niche + Google-like coverage is not very economically viable. To store and update a search index of that size requires a lot of resources, and being niche means you don’t have a lot of resources.
Very few of the smaller search engines actually do their own indexing for exactly this reason.
The problem is that the web as we know it (useful, human-curated information that's put out there to help people) is also over. It's been totally overrun with AI slop. Even before AI could be used to create propaganda on a scale that we could only dream about 5 years ago, it's been declining under the weight of SEO sweatshops for a good 10 years. Meanwhile the actually decent content, the individual hobbyists who are just sharing their knowledge, have largely left under the weight of comment spam and DDoS attacks and doxxing.
So if another search engine does arise, it won't find anything useful, because the useful content on the web has been buried under slop, and largely removed. Your best bet today is a curated directory, sorta like the original Yahoo, where you allowlist the web to only real sites, download them, and make them searchable. I think this is actually Kagi's approach. But the open web as we knew and loved it is dead.
My literal first thought was "do I seriously need to use bing now?".
Bing has been better than Google for some time. Again, it's embarrassing for them to sacrifice marketshare for paid results and an intermediate-form AI fad that will turn into the same paid result funnel.
>Google’s AI Overviews will also allow users to ask follow-up questions in AI Mode, beginning Tuesday, the company noted.
have i been A/B tested into something, or has this been live for months? this doens't seem new.
Basically people who want to search, will now not be able to, they'll be forced into a UI they might have consciously avoided, otherwise they'd be using their chatbot in the first place. Seems like a strange UX decision, rather than recommending "Hey maybe you want to try our chatbot", they just force the user into a chat straight up.
That's the whole shape of AI for consumer-facing functions like this. It's not superior to the previous experience, but huge sunk costs and a misguided belief it's the "next thing" is leading companies to try to force the issue. It's the Apple removing the headphone jack of the modern Internet. A change for the worse that we'll all have to find ways to work around.
Google famously dragged on development of Glass for more than a decade stubbornly failing to admit that nobody wants to look like a cyborg the entire time only to be swept aside by Meta when they built a device that was glasses first with some recording and interactions built in.
If their leadership has an itch they'll scratch it until it's raw.
Beyond the AI expenses, prompting captures more information from the consumer that keyword search. I assume they can take a lot of advantage from this and a new generation of ad engines is near the corner.
I read some of the article and skimmed the rest, and didn't see anything about old-fashioned search no longer being an option.
Is the idea that by making the new AI chat UX the default, that's how they're forcing people into it and making them not able to search? Or is there something I'm missing?
Makes sense to me. A chat UI has more avenues for subtle advertising & sentiment manipulation than plain links do.
It is weird that they're putting all their eggs in one basket though. Wouldn't a more sensible business move be to launch that platform (and advertise it heavily) but maintain the old search UX to fend off competition?
Going all in like this carries a very real risk of burning users onto other platforms and the continued evolution of integrated search bars are already slicing off significant user segments.
I understand the consternation here about this change. And I've noticed recently getting frustrated because I'm looking for a search list but the UI throws me into AI mode first. But the think is I use traditional search so much less now that those annoyances are the exception. I can't say whether they are making a mistake, but they've got to have extensive data, and I'm going to bet that an overwhelming amount of people don't click through to the search results anymore for most quick queries. They probably really don't have a choice if they are going to effectively keep ChatGPT at bay. Of course, all this is terrible for the internet. That headline should have been: The Internet as you know it is over.
Internet search should remain internet search. If I want to use AI, it should be an option, not a replacement of internet search.
Time to switch to old style search engines which still return the 10 blue links, with an AI option.
So good SEO will require prompt injection now?
I haven't used Google search for years. It's almost totally irrelevant at this point and existing on pure inertia.
I'm aware that most people still use it, but it's nothing like the glory days when Google was far ahead of the pack.
Time to pay for Kagi everyone!
That's why Kagi is the only subscription I don't actively think about cancelling. For the love of god, keep me away from Google and all of THAT. If Kagi goes down the same path, I'll selfhost something or just return to monkey and use link indexes and the favorites list + the native search of websites.
Self hosting a web search engine is probably quite a feat
I believe it is a thing. Saw it somewhere, like a peer to peer search engine.
Cool. I hope this blows up in their face and is reverted in a few months. I don't need my phone book index to suddenly not be an index and force me to use a call center instead.
Initially I thought AI would would crush google search, but starting to think the opposite. Think they have survived the transition.
After I got tired of perplexity's nonsense I realized the workspace account (which I have for custom email domain) came with fancy gemini pro chat.
Was a fucking ripoff for the domain thing...but domain plus premium chat clearly marked as "we won't train on your data"...the math starts mathing better again.
Google has become exclusively an advertising company long time ago, it's stopped being a search engine since years.
"Did you mean?" + excluded word was a pretty clear indication they stopped caring to provide any meaningful search whatsoever.
I did not start using Google because the results were better.
I started using Google because the interface was far superior in the time before adblocking existed and after Flash existed.
Search results were better because they did not contain hidden paid results.
Search was measurably improved with the second generation of Wikipedia. Google did an excellent job understanding this and tended to just place the Wikipedia article at the top. Also helpful for Google was that Wikipedia's original search engine was useless, similar for YouTube whenever it came around.
Today, I use Google less than once per month. I'm not sure I've been there at all this year. Maybe at the end of last year I was using it and found nothing better than I found on other search engines.
Finally google search result ridden with ads and useless results will be replaced by chatbot answers also ridden with ads, unnecessary commenatry from the bot and ads.
I think this will be one of those things that the hacker news crowd lambasts and calls a mistake but will either be neutral or seen as a positive to your average user.
The average user may be fine with it (though I think many will not). But given this is basically killing the open web, I don't see where Google plans to get the results to feed this AI thing in a year or so
I think you underestimate how many users loathe that "Generated with AI" box. But for me the bigger question is why they're going all in on this instead of a gradual rollout or a new tool offering.
Agree, but the average user trusts the AI knowledge box as expert summary, even though clicking through often reveals contrary information, so this is going to be a net negative overall for a while…
While I can certainly see this upsetting some people, I'm not sure if this is necessarily "bad".
Web 2.0 was Yahoo Pipes, public APIs, IFTTT, etc. while this new "Web 3.0" acknowledges that those capabilities would rather be gatekept behind AI instead of entirely removed.
At the very least we do get some of that functionality back without resorting to scraping anymore and it's now accessible to the layperson. I would think this would nudge the layperson to demand more and inevitably want the actual data without the training wheels or sandboxes. Is that not a "good" thing?
Is the pushback against this out of genuine concern or just ideological?
There is a lot at stake for Google - that search box has firehosed cash non stop into the company money bin for decades.
Google search has been dead for years.
What we need now is back to the roots - just a simple grep for the internet augmented by pagerank and eventually some sort of ai and harness to sort the rubish out. The AI companies have the data and the harnesses.
Google killed themselves when they made sure you can't search direct quotes or outside of your region. If I am going to sort trough vague crap - it is better AI to do it. And AI doesn't look at ads.
There is real opening for a company that just crawls and gives access to other companies to build on top of the collected stuff.
It's been over for years. Google scares companies into bidding against each other just to be seen. It's a complete farce & a racket. It's the pay to play web.
Google’s making a terrible, though understandable, mistake. They think people go to Google to see what Google wants to show them. This is like the people who run the airport imagining that travelers are popping by to see the decorations.
Every organization eventually is taken over by the people who operate within it effectively, to the detriment of the people who operate outside and provide the actual public value. They are surely hearing themselves say the same things about how Google is “everything in one place” that every failed corporation parrots on their way out.
Google is trying to change that though. Ie a Mini Empire State Building in JFK
Slop as a Service (SaaS)...
It's been over for years. I switched to Kagi during the pandemic and haven't looked back.
I understand why they are doing this. My Google search usage is easily down 50%+. I doubt I am unique here.
While there are times where I want pure search (Kagi, Old Google) I mostly use LLMs to search now and have them provide me links for source data.
When I do use LLMs as a search engine I always want it integrated into my AI workflows with access to tools and scripts etc. I never want to have a conversation with a website that is geared towards advertising me products.
I'm not at all in the same boat as you; I do not and likely will never primarily rely on LLMs for information. But it's fascinating to hear that even folks who do don't find this approach useful.
I think LLMs are better at finding the most helpful sources now, but that's more a testament to how much the front page of web search has lost to low value LLM content.
I'm not jumping in with both feet, either, but "never" is a very big word.
"Primarily" is the other key there. I'll use it from time to time with sources. But it's not first-line acceptable.
> I never want to have a conversation with a website that is geared towards advertising me products.
yeah man good thing LLMs are structurally incapable of being incentivized to sell you a product or render referral links, this is surely future-proof
That’s the thing… sure, this new search will be useful at times.
But I still want to also be able to do my normal, old school searching.
Nilay Patel has been talking about "Google Zero" - the moment when Google effectively stops sending any traffic to other sites - for a few years now: https://www.theverge.com/24167865/google-zero-search-crash-h...
I don't trust facts from LLMs. When I am searching for something, I usually want to find primary sources. As soon as a number is involved, I do my best to not even look at the AI output.
Even though the result is often good and combines information from multiple sources, it can also get things wrong by combining information from different eras or just plain outdated advice. AFAICT, without primary sources, the result is for entertainment purposes only.
You can ask them to cite their sources. It's very good practice to do so, and to check those sources, because I've found that about 30-40% of the time their source doesn't support their answer at all.
If it's wrong 2 out of 5 times, why even waste your time going to it in the first place? That's a massive failure rate.
All of Google AI Mode is sourced.
Yes, and those sources often contradict the AI summary if you follow them (or if you know anything about the topic).
Objecting to this from the user end seems a bit like complaining the original Google was trying to be too magic when what you wanted was AltaVista. This has been the inevitable direction the whole time.
The real problem here is assuming this takes off what incentives will anyone have to provide the information to feed the beast?
>Objecting to this from the user end seems a bit like complaining the original Google was trying to be too magic when what you wanted was AltaVista. This has been the inevitable direction the whole time.
Did AltaVista get replaced by the owner of the site to justify a giant investment?
Exactly, why should sites give free bandwidth to the google bots hammering them for nothing in return? Outside of retail, there's no point in allowing google to crawl if you're not getting anything in return.
Also, as a user, I want websites written by real humans. I do not want generic LLM output always has the same boring style. I like human writing, perfectly native English, broken second language English, I don't care. Human writing is unique and makes reading a pleasure.
Of course, even Google the search engine has gotten worse at surfacing interesting websites. First came the SEO spam websites, now the slop websites.
I'm glad that alternatives like Kagi exist.
Kind of Google to create a market opening for its competitors like this. I hope Kagi, Bing, and DuckDuckGo are taking notes.
I'm sure there's a niche for a product for search nerds. Something that leans into inverted indexes like the classic Lexis/Nexis search. But it's got to have Google-like coverage.
Niche + Google-like coverage is not very economically viable. To store and update a search index of that size requires a lot of resources, and being niche means you don’t have a lot of resources.
Very few of the smaller search engines actually do their own indexing for exactly this reason.
The problem is that the web as we know it (useful, human-curated information that's put out there to help people) is also over. It's been totally overrun with AI slop. Even before AI could be used to create propaganda on a scale that we could only dream about 5 years ago, it's been declining under the weight of SEO sweatshops for a good 10 years. Meanwhile the actually decent content, the individual hobbyists who are just sharing their knowledge, have largely left under the weight of comment spam and DDoS attacks and doxxing.
So if another search engine does arise, it won't find anything useful, because the useful content on the web has been buried under slop, and largely removed. Your best bet today is a curated directory, sorta like the original Yahoo, where you allowlist the web to only real sites, download them, and make them searchable. I think this is actually Kagi's approach. But the open web as we knew and loved it is dead.
My literal first thought was "do I seriously need to use bing now?".
Bing has been better than Google for some time. Again, it's embarrassing for them to sacrifice marketshare for paid results and an intermediate-form AI fad that will turn into the same paid result funnel.
>Google’s AI Overviews will also allow users to ask follow-up questions in AI Mode, beginning Tuesday, the company noted.
have i been A/B tested into something, or has this been live for months? this doens't seem new.
Basically people who want to search, will now not be able to, they'll be forced into a UI they might have consciously avoided, otherwise they'd be using their chatbot in the first place. Seems like a strange UX decision, rather than recommending "Hey maybe you want to try our chatbot", they just force the user into a chat straight up.
That's the whole shape of AI for consumer-facing functions like this. It's not superior to the previous experience, but huge sunk costs and a misguided belief it's the "next thing" is leading companies to try to force the issue. It's the Apple removing the headphone jack of the modern Internet. A change for the worse that we'll all have to find ways to work around.
Google famously dragged on development of Glass for more than a decade stubbornly failing to admit that nobody wants to look like a cyborg the entire time only to be swept aside by Meta when they built a device that was glasses first with some recording and interactions built in.
If their leadership has an itch they'll scratch it until it's raw.
Beyond the AI expenses, prompting captures more information from the consumer that keyword search. I assume they can take a lot of advantage from this and a new generation of ad engines is near the corner.
I read some of the article and skimmed the rest, and didn't see anything about old-fashioned search no longer being an option.
Is the idea that by making the new AI chat UX the default, that's how they're forcing people into it and making them not able to search? Or is there something I'm missing?
Makes sense to me. A chat UI has more avenues for subtle advertising & sentiment manipulation than plain links do.
It is weird that they're putting all their eggs in one basket though. Wouldn't a more sensible business move be to launch that platform (and advertise it heavily) but maintain the old search UX to fend off competition?
Going all in like this carries a very real risk of burning users onto other platforms and the continued evolution of integrated search bars are already slicing off significant user segments.
I understand the consternation here about this change. And I've noticed recently getting frustrated because I'm looking for a search list but the UI throws me into AI mode first. But the think is I use traditional search so much less now that those annoyances are the exception. I can't say whether they are making a mistake, but they've got to have extensive data, and I'm going to bet that an overwhelming amount of people don't click through to the search results anymore for most quick queries. They probably really don't have a choice if they are going to effectively keep ChatGPT at bay. Of course, all this is terrible for the internet. That headline should have been: The Internet as you know it is over.
Internet search should remain internet search. If I want to use AI, it should be an option, not a replacement of internet search.
Time to switch to old style search engines which still return the 10 blue links, with an AI option.
So good SEO will require prompt injection now?
I haven't used Google search for years. It's almost totally irrelevant at this point and existing on pure inertia.
I'm aware that most people still use it, but it's nothing like the glory days when Google was far ahead of the pack.
Time to pay for Kagi everyone!
That's why Kagi is the only subscription I don't actively think about cancelling. For the love of god, keep me away from Google and all of THAT. If Kagi goes down the same path, I'll selfhost something or just return to monkey and use link indexes and the favorites list + the native search of websites.
Self hosting a web search engine is probably quite a feat
I believe it is a thing. Saw it somewhere, like a peer to peer search engine.
Cool. I hope this blows up in their face and is reverted in a few months. I don't need my phone book index to suddenly not be an index and force me to use a call center instead.
Initially I thought AI would would crush google search, but starting to think the opposite. Think they have survived the transition.
After I got tired of perplexity's nonsense I realized the workspace account (which I have for custom email domain) came with fancy gemini pro chat.
Was a fucking ripoff for the domain thing...but domain plus premium chat clearly marked as "we won't train on your data"...the math starts mathing better again.
Google has become exclusively an advertising company long time ago, it's stopped being a search engine since years.
"Did you mean?" + excluded word was a pretty clear indication they stopped caring to provide any meaningful search whatsoever.
I did not start using Google because the results were better.
I started using Google because the interface was far superior in the time before adblocking existed and after Flash existed.
Search results were better because they did not contain hidden paid results.
Search was measurably improved with the second generation of Wikipedia. Google did an excellent job understanding this and tended to just place the Wikipedia article at the top. Also helpful for Google was that Wikipedia's original search engine was useless, similar for YouTube whenever it came around.
Today, I use Google less than once per month. I'm not sure I've been there at all this year. Maybe at the end of last year I was using it and found nothing better than I found on other search engines.
Finally google search result ridden with ads and useless results will be replaced by chatbot answers also ridden with ads, unnecessary commenatry from the bot and ads.
I think this will be one of those things that the hacker news crowd lambasts and calls a mistake but will either be neutral or seen as a positive to your average user.
The average user may be fine with it (though I think many will not). But given this is basically killing the open web, I don't see where Google plans to get the results to feed this AI thing in a year or so
I think you underestimate how many users loathe that "Generated with AI" box. But for me the bigger question is why they're going all in on this instead of a gradual rollout or a new tool offering.
Agree, but the average user trusts the AI knowledge box as expert summary, even though clicking through often reveals contrary information, so this is going to be a net negative overall for a while…
While I can certainly see this upsetting some people, I'm not sure if this is necessarily "bad".
Web 2.0 was Yahoo Pipes, public APIs, IFTTT, etc. while this new "Web 3.0" acknowledges that those capabilities would rather be gatekept behind AI instead of entirely removed.
At the very least we do get some of that functionality back without resorting to scraping anymore and it's now accessible to the layperson. I would think this would nudge the layperson to demand more and inevitably want the actual data without the training wheels or sandboxes. Is that not a "good" thing?
Is the pushback against this out of genuine concern or just ideological?
There is a lot at stake for Google - that search box has firehosed cash non stop into the company money bin for decades.
Google search has been dead for years.
What we need now is back to the roots - just a simple grep for the internet augmented by pagerank and eventually some sort of ai and harness to sort the rubish out. The AI companies have the data and the harnesses.
Google killed themselves when they made sure you can't search direct quotes or outside of your region. If I am going to sort trough vague crap - it is better AI to do it. And AI doesn't look at ads.
There is real opening for a company that just crawls and gives access to other companies to build on top of the collected stuff.
It's been over for years. Google scares companies into bidding against each other just to be seen. It's a complete farce & a racket. It's the pay to play web.
Google’s making a terrible, though understandable, mistake. They think people go to Google to see what Google wants to show them. This is like the people who run the airport imagining that travelers are popping by to see the decorations.
Every organization eventually is taken over by the people who operate within it effectively, to the detriment of the people who operate outside and provide the actual public value. They are surely hearing themselves say the same things about how Google is “everything in one place” that every failed corporation parrots on their way out.
Google is trying to change that though. Ie a Mini Empire State Building in JFK
Slop as a Service (SaaS)...
It's been over for years. I switched to Kagi during the pandemic and haven't looked back.