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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
Over the past year to 1.5 years, in the sites I run, I have seen a drop in traffic from Google, which leveled off, and is now slightly rising.
I think if you look through this thread you’ll see a lot of skepticism of the AI results, and I think that is a fairly broadly held opinion. The obvious way to check the AI answer is to click through to some sources.
I think for Google to stop sending me traffic, it would have to be essentially perfect at AI answers. It will never get there, especially as so many searches are opinion-based like “what is the best mobile phone right now.”
That article is not even two years old… “for a few years” make it sound like he saw it coming long before it started. He’s just describing a trend and its ineluctable destination.
But I do agree it will be or already is a paradigm shift. And a painful one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's tough for me to square the two things happening simultaneously in AI right now:
1. LLM Model providers are starting to charge real costs to users, revealing that AI usage is much more expensive than the subsidized rates we've been seeing for years.
2. Google is now using an LLM to answer every single google search that happens, for which Google bears the entire cost.
This view misses a key point: the cost of LLMs is largely in the training rather than the use of the tools.
That is, it's training costs which are fixed, high, and amortised across all revenue potential.
In raising prices, pure-play AI chatbot vendors are facing the challenge that their only revenue option at present is pay-for-use. This is typical of numerous other information goods (software, comms networks, information services), but simply reflects the business reality that cost-basis and revenue-basis are largely disconnected, and that average cost pricing tends to be necessary despite not matching marginal cost provision. (That is, the charged per-unit price of use is going to be far higher than the actual marginal cost of provision for that use.
Google's situation differs from pure-play AI in several ways:
- The firm already has one of if not the largest corpus of Web data, as well as much offline / print material data (Google Books), of any entity in the world.
- Presuming Google are already using this for training AI for other purposes or general resource, the fixed costs are sunk costs already incurred, subsidised by the firm's existing AdTech monopoly, and which might as well be put to use.
- Similarly, Google's service costs (marginal costs) for traditional GWS are probably, within an order of magnitude comparable to those for an AI/LLM response.
- Google presently captures 90% or more of worldwide general web search (GWS) traffic, meaning it has an extant market for offering AI as a default search alternative.
- Complaints about declining Google search quality are nearly as old as Hacker News. Here's a seventeen year old submission on that topic, "Google's regression toward mediocrity (search quality & aggressive matching)" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=641145> (2009). There are many, many, many results in both stories and comments for related searches. If traditional Web search is going to die anyway, and LLMs replace it, Google might as well get up on the curve.
- Google has arguably the most advanced ranking data for websites, whether that's on the basis of quality and relevance (for good) or advertising/revenue generation (for bad, at least from a public-value perspective), and can and all but certainly does leverage this in training runs, as well as use that training to further refine its ranking systems.
- Google can directly attach its existing AdTech revenue model to LLM search. And probably has options for extending advertising into the LLM SERPs themselves.
- Doing all of this directly attacks pure-play AI firms' attempts to capture Web search from Google, as well as challenges other GWS challengers (DDG, Kagi, Marginalia, etc.), all of whom have vastly lesser revenue options and technical resources than Google.
I'm not saying this as a fan of Google (I think the firm should be broken up or destroyed, and it's not the only one). But I think it's a fair assessment of the firm's strategic position.
Gone are the days where people are searching for websites. People are searching for answers. This trend started when Google Search added a calculator. I distinctly remember when Google started showing answers to simple questions like “what is the elevation of Everest” nearly 15 years ago. This is just the next evolution of that.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't trust facts from humans. When I am searching for something, I usually want to find direct sensor readings. As soon as a number is involved, I do my best to not even look at the human output.
Even though the result is often coherent and confidently synthesizes information from multiple experiences, it can also hallucinate, suffer from recency bias, or accidentally merge memories from different decades. AFAICT, without access to the underlying telemetry, human responses are for entertainment purposes only.
From the past hundreds of Google searches I've done where I got an AI summary, I'd say the result is actually rarely good. At the very least 80% of the outputs contain critical mistakes, often exactly about the specific thing you're asking.
It's all slop. Look at the first two examples in their own announcement: fitness and wellness slop from websites like "top 11 exercises to do when you work from home", and god damn sneaker drops and what bloody influencers are saying about some celeb-endorsed sneaker. Jesus christ
Sounds like a good question to ask Google (… only partially joking)
There are many primary sources depending on exactly what you are looking for. Shipping/port manifests or even stats are often findable. People in the region witnessing first-hand what is happening. If you are interested in political views then people who are in charge of policy and control resources in the region. Etc etc…
If you want a summary then, yes, you want a journalist or another source that looks at primary sources and has some knowledge of the region to start with to help give context to a specific situation.
Just wanted to check you really meant primary source.
I don’t understand how you can learn anything then. News is off limits for you, history, sciences (unless you do the experiment yourself) as well. Math might be possible, at least you can check the proof yourself without having to travel anywhere. At least one can see the earth isn‘t flat by getting on a plane, but one has to squint a bit.
More seriously, to summarise, I don’t believe you live by this principle, you would live under a rock and I wouldn’t be chatting with you.
I think you/we are in the minority. I’m surrounded by parents that start sentences with “ChatGPT told me…” or “I asked AI and…”.
We’re often talking about something that the literature refutes, but the LLM was trained on a bunch of public content from resources such as whattoexpect.com, full of terrible parenting advice.
People didn’t bother with sources and research before, they don’t bother now, AI is just a magical thing for them.
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?
248 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadAgentic capabilities and AI-powered interactive features in the search experience - most definitely will.
> You can still view traditional results only by selecting the “Web” tab in Google Search
I think we should still get a couple of years of life from Google. This is enough time to figure out what to do next.
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.
I think if you look through this thread you’ll see a lot of skepticism of the AI results, and I think that is a fairly broadly held opinion. The obvious way to check the AI answer is to click through to some sources.
I think for Google to stop sending me traffic, it would have to be essentially perfect at AI answers. It will never get there, especially as so many searches are opinion-based like “what is the best mobile phone right now.”
In the future I don't even use Google but my bot does
But I do agree it will be or already is a paradigm shift. And a painful one.
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.
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.
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.
1. LLM Model providers are starting to charge real costs to users, revealing that AI usage is much more expensive than the subsidized rates we've been seeing for years.
2. Google is now using an LLM to answer every single google search that happens, for which Google bears the entire cost.
That is, it's training costs which are fixed, high, and amortised across all revenue potential.
In raising prices, pure-play AI chatbot vendors are facing the challenge that their only revenue option at present is pay-for-use. This is typical of numerous other information goods (software, comms networks, information services), but simply reflects the business reality that cost-basis and revenue-basis are largely disconnected, and that average cost pricing tends to be necessary despite not matching marginal cost provision. (That is, the charged per-unit price of use is going to be far higher than the actual marginal cost of provision for that use.
Google's situation differs from pure-play AI in several ways:
- The firm already has one of if not the largest corpus of Web data, as well as much offline / print material data (Google Books), of any entity in the world.
- Presuming Google are already using this for training AI for other purposes or general resource, the fixed costs are sunk costs already incurred, subsidised by the firm's existing AdTech monopoly, and which might as well be put to use.
- Similarly, Google's service costs (marginal costs) for traditional GWS are probably, within an order of magnitude comparable to those for an AI/LLM response.
- Google presently captures 90% or more of worldwide general web search (GWS) traffic, meaning it has an extant market for offering AI as a default search alternative.
- Complaints about declining Google search quality are nearly as old as Hacker News. Here's a seventeen year old submission on that topic, "Google's regression toward mediocrity (search quality & aggressive matching)" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=641145> (2009). There are many, many, many results in both stories and comments for related searches. If traditional Web search is going to die anyway, and LLMs replace it, Google might as well get up on the curve.
- Google has arguably the most advanced ranking data for websites, whether that's on the basis of quality and relevance (for good) or advertising/revenue generation (for bad, at least from a public-value perspective), and can and all but certainly does leverage this in training runs, as well as use that training to further refine its ranking systems.
- Google can directly attach its existing AdTech revenue model to LLM search. And probably has options for extending advertising into the LLM SERPs themselves.
- Doing all of this directly attacks pure-play AI firms' attempts to capture Web search from Google, as well as challenges other GWS challengers (DDG, Kagi, Marginalia, etc.), all of whom have vastly lesser revenue options and technical resources than Google.
I'm not saying this as a fan of Google (I think the firm should be broken up or destroyed, and it's not the only one). But I think it's a fair assessment of the firm's strategic position.
The real problem here is assuming this takes off what incentives will anyone have to provide the information to feed the beast?
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.
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.
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.
Even though the result is often coherent and confidently synthesizes information from multiple experiences, it can also hallucinate, suffer from recency bias, or accidentally merge memories from different decades. AFAICT, without access to the underlying telemetry, human responses are for entertainment purposes only.
From the past hundreds of Google searches I've done where I got an AI summary, I'd say the result is actually rarely good. At the very least 80% of the outputs contain critical mistakes, often exactly about the specific thing you're asking.
For most things I research, there is only secondary sources, reporting on an event, a trend…
There are many primary sources depending on exactly what you are looking for. Shipping/port manifests or even stats are often findable. People in the region witnessing first-hand what is happening. If you are interested in political views then people who are in charge of policy and control resources in the region. Etc etc…
If you want a summary then, yes, you want a journalist or another source that looks at primary sources and has some knowledge of the region to start with to help give context to a specific situation.
I don’t understand how you can learn anything then. News is off limits for you, history, sciences (unless you do the experiment yourself) as well. Math might be possible, at least you can check the proof yourself without having to travel anywhere. At least one can see the earth isn‘t flat by getting on a plane, but one has to squint a bit.
More seriously, to summarise, I don’t believe you live by this principle, you would live under a rock and I wouldn’t be chatting with you.
We’re often talking about something that the literature refutes, but the LLM was trained on a bunch of public content from resources such as whattoexpect.com, full of terrible parenting advice.
People didn’t bother with sources and research before, they don’t bother now, AI is just a magical thing for them.
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?
Time to switch to old style search engines which still return the 10 blue links, with an AI option.