OTOH if I'm looking up an answer to a tax question, I don't just immediately trust the first answer from AI mode. I use it more as a knowledgeable friend who is not a tax attorney and so cannot be 100% trusted, but he/she is giving me useful pointers to go do deeper research and arrive at an answer.
I left google for chagpt/claude, but have slowly been coming back because these results have become rather useful -- especially when google inspects actual video content to produce replies. This is one of the best outcomes of the AI wave for me: content which was locked away in YouTube videos and forced me to consume it sequentially (without power-reading as I do with articles) is now indexed in search results in some AI summary. It makes mistakes, but it lets me figure out the right videos to watch, and often gives me enough context to find the solution myself. This applies to work, but also to something as simple as game walkthroughs!
As with everything, you need to know when to trust and when to doubt, when to iterate on chat (or chat with it with a smarter assistant like ChatGPT/claude). Hasn't it always been this way (minus the chat)?
I don't understand why people seem to be under this idea that just because it's at the top of a search results page it must be entirely correct, when we have spent decades knowing that you can't trust what's on the internet and you need to have critical thinking. Were you blindly trusting your first-page google results? What about when Wikipedia was starting, were you also trusting it blindly? Do you trust it blindly now?
In fact, when google started stealing the content of websites to display it, wasn't it already producing largely incorrect results because so many hits were SEO-garbage or outdated? (Not that we don't need to address the fact that this steals traffic from websites -- but it's a problem that PREDATES AI and absolutely still needs to be addressed somehow)
I can understand it if they believe the average joe will be more likely to blindly trust this, but that's an education problem -- and one we already had and has perhaps been compounded.
The visceral hate for a a life-changing technology that enables us to do more, faster, never ceases to amaze me. I'm growing so tired of it around my inner circles.
I get that there is a real bubble with real overhype and that some companies are profiting from it and shoving it down everyone's throats. I get that your actual life is worse because of this (you are forced to use shit models to produce more features while being paid the same). I get that maybe your job might change, and that for some people they will actually need to job-hop. This all absolutely sucks and it is a problem for many people, I get that! But that doesn't make the technology as a whole terrible, much less a bunch of its amazing applications. It's this constant wave of negativity, like nothing good will ever come out of AI and we're all doomed to be cornered by the big evil corporations that will run us dry.
It's hard to be rational when you're overcome with emotion and fear, I know, but it's so aggravating to have to interact with someone who can only see the technology itself as negative.
It's one of the few AI features, despite still being shoved in my face, that I actually find useful.
With that said, the worst thing is how search results have degraded significantly since the AI years, even before they added the actual "AI mode."
Google now (and quite a few search features on other services, e.g., Twitter) often returns results that have ZERO relationship to the search keywords I gave -- like an entirely different person when searching for a person's name, which I think should never happen and did not happen when search was still based on a "rigid" algorithm of indexed content. So, I can only assume it's because they have some AI thingy along the process.
Now all the junk comes to the top and the sites you get all have ads and modal popups or sales funnel flows
It's SEO's fault that Google frequently prioritizes giving you results that are semantically or thematically related but ultimately irrelevant to what you searched for.
It's SEO's fault that Google refuses to place ads on websites not full of meandering irrelevant "content".
It's SEO's fault Google search all-but-ignores most single-purpose tool websites.
It's not the result of decisions made by Google's programmers and project managers - it's allllll the fault of SEO!
The SEO industry definitely isn't an all-purpose scapegoat for horribly unpopular decisions made by human beings at Google.
> When you search for something, you're usually not looking for a sentence. You're looking for evidence.
There is a long and storied history of Google offering more than just a list of links to go search for, since at least 2012, because a massive amount of people literally are looking for the single answer to a question, whether stated explicitly or implicit in the search term.
"Clicking through now feels like expressing distrust in the tool, rather than just doing your homework."
This is off. Just between us, the "AI" does not have feelings. It does not care if you express distrust in it.
The example given is you want evidence from an original source in Stack Overflow. So instead of just typing a few keywords and digging through pages, your query needs to ask Google exactly what you want and the format you want it in. If that’s a list of Stack Overflow pages, then that’s what you ask for. You can test this out now with AI summaries and a well-written query.
The quality of your results is going to depend on what you put into it. It will probably be annoying for some at first but for those that get it it’s going to be a step up.
The "quality" of your prompt is irrelevant when you're feeding it to something that just imagines things.
That's ridiculous. There isn't a learning curve, we don't want AI. No amount of "learning" is going to make these misbegotten features into something that actually improves my experience with the product. You should listen to people, not assume that you know their desires better than they do.
It's kinda nice actually.
Here's a relevant example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44142113
Great points..
If I need a chatbot I'll launch the app. Mixing the AI answers in SERP is too much noise for me.
companies deliberately obscure some information and it helps.
how much does "<product>" cost
what is the phone number for "<company>"
We have AI now and it's doing a mostly incredible job getting us ANSWERS, not SEARCH LINKS. Trying to pretend that links are better is just trying to copy with rapid change.
Quite honestly I'm shocked that Google keeps making more money with search ads because I don't search anymore, I get answers directly from it or ChatGPT without clicking on any links.
If you feel that it's better, you are free to use it. Leave the rest of us, who think AI is bad at finding information and want to search, in peace so we can work the way we like. I don't think that's an unreasonable expectation: you can work the way you like, and I can work the way I like.
I'm genuinely scared for a generation of people who've offshored their thinking, planning and creativity muscles to a few tech companies.
We think we're gaining an edge but we're really participating in a mind control experiment thats optimized to benefit those companies, not us as individual.
Miss me with AI, it will break your brain and start to control more and more of your behavior if you let it. Don't become a drone. You're not going to become some crazy productive SaaS founder becauae you have AI, you'll become a drone who's competency is 1:1 correlated to the quality and quantity of tokens you have access too/
It's up to you, the human, to decide what path you get the information and how to digest it and use it. I use LLMs for 99% of my "querying" these days because 99% of the information I'm looking for is either verifiable (coding) or low-stakes (how to do low-risk DIY house thing).
If I need actual search, I use Kagi. Otherwise, Claude has taken 99.8% of what Google used to do for me and it feels better than ever.