My friends who previously had no interest in technology and never talked about it, are suddenly following tech news closely all because they hate AI being pushed so hard. One was just messaging me this morning about alternatives to Google search and maps. He ended up downloading DuckDuckGo.
If Google isn’t carefully they’re going to push people away from their golden goose.
The AI product rollouts in the last two years have been some of the most aggressive and user hostile product rollouts in my entire life.
All conventions and user centricity go out the window with AI feature launches lately. If you look at examples from the last week it’s stuff like posthogs opt-out training, Copilot training, or Google’s antigravity chat-app switch.
I’ve had the worst customer experiences of my life in the last few months.
My health insurance company decided calling support meant I consented to them saving my voice for model training. They said you can opt-out online, but that option didn’t exist in app or on their website. It was only after calling back and threatening to sue that they added an option to opt-out.
This is the daily experience now. Seemingly every company is opting you into selling your data, breaking your workflows, disabling features you use, and force installing AI integrations you have to fight to remove. And several companies are perfectly fine to reenable or reinstall them after removal.
It should be no surprise to anyone people are mad.
What real value AI does have has been poisoned by premature rollouts (training users it’s crap) and forcing it on people too aggressively.
After-the-fact opt-outs are something I never trust. Most data selling is opt-in and requires the user to opt-out. It seems to me that when I submit the form, the data would be instantly sold and by the time I get to the opt-out form it’s too late.
If this isn’t how it works, I’d be interested to know. The whole idea of these opt-outs seem like smoke and mirrors to act good while still gaining the advantage from the dark pattern. The only way to truly opt-out is to not register or use a service at all. There really needs to be legislation around this.
That's how it worked the last time I bought a car. I submitted the opt-outs with the purchase paperwork, the ~sales~ data sharing agreements with 10k of the dealership's closest, paid friends were processed first, and I had no end of bullshit from a hundred companies I'd never interacted with previously.
That sounds lawsuit worthy. If you submitted both sets of paperwork at the same time, a reasonable expectation would be for your opt-opt application to be processed first, otherwise it’s pointless.
In praxis, yes especially if it has already left the jurisdiction.
Disregarding that, laws don't apply to the first processing party only. If you keep data, that you got informed are not consented to anymore, it is the same as if you keep selling fenced goods.
Same goes for any "regulation" in the states. Gov't does their job only when it brings revenue in the $$$$$$ territory. Everything else is civil and ignored - even if it's promoting the sale of millions of protected information.
Of all the reports I've submitted (evidence included) followups and fines have been issued to exactly 0 companies. Hell, Quadlock [phone mount company] happily acknowledged that their policy is to verify identity by requesting plain emails including photocopies of the credit card used for purchase and full state ID. Absolutely against regs.. who cares? Not the SCC nor the FTC.
One of the recent rollouts that really grind my gears was Spotify rolling out LLM explanations of songs. Which is the most useful wasteful piece of sh*t ever. Why would I want to get a theory of what is 174bpm and other random crap.
It is insane, and I hate modernity and every single modern product that just shoves random LLM crap at you and pretend they are not AI-enabled.
Even the more open source apps are shoving ads for simple and obvious features, I went as far as to build my own entertainment system and it serves all my needs and I dont have to worry about the next time I click next I hear a FUCKING AD.
Honestly, this is true for all streaming, not just Spotify. Stream if you want, but also buy albums from them if they offer it. Merch is even better.
Hell, even if you... acquire the music files unofficially and go buy a t-shirt or poster, the artist is still probably getting way more than they ever would have from you streaming all their albums on a loop.
It’s true but Spotify has consolidated the market in a way that I think no other provider has managed - maybe Tidal or YouTube Music.
Some musicians that I know personally don’t like Spotify but they feel they have to be on there or be invisible.
One fascinating thing about LLMs is the degree of evangelism it inspires in some. You can explain some of that with paid micro influencers, people invested in the success of AI, consultants looking for workshop opportunities and all that, but I know enough people with no skin in the game at all, that turned into very vocal advocates.
I think to some degree, that effect is also at play here. CEOs, product managers etc are simply amazed, and want to spread the good news. I doubt they can even _comprehend_ that others might not be as excited as them.
One character I find interesting is Ezra Klein from the New York Times who desperately wants to see something positive come out of markets and industry and has an enthusiasm for AI which is not shared by his audience. He struggles to understand that skepticism and I think that's bad for his project.
At least he's not one of the many mooks who are doing ChatGPT-assisted (Grok-assisted?) blogging and boasting about it, even when it goes wrong, like Casey Handmer.
The entire purpose of people like Ezra Klein, Derek Thomas, and the elite journalist + consultant establishment is to simply preserve the neoliberal order and make sure any questions regarding it are confined in a box they defined where the outcomes never address material needs of the people.
I think comparing Klein and Thompson is like comparing Chess and Tic-Tac-Toe. At the very least Klein patiently reminds Jewish people that they really can be the baddies if they choose to be.
Lol. Disregarding risk of bringing Chess to TTT's level, it's bc Klein seems to have a broader actually inclusive self-identity. so usually, when he reminds, he is also reminding himself..
You also have to consider a ( I would argue large ) percentage of those evangelists are simply lying for financial gain. They see profit, or at least reduced costs, and quite simply don't give a shit about customer experience or anything like that.
I think there’s a lot of that dream — note how many of them became AI experts after striking out in cryptocurrency — but also a huge undercurrent of desperation. The rich guys who run most of the economy have made it clear that they want mass layoffs and that LLMs are the tool they’ll use to get there, so these guys are hoping that if they get on board early enough they’ll be the people doing it to everyone else rather than the targets. I’m not sure how successful that’ll be but it’s somewhat understandable how people might find themselves thinking that’s the best option available in the current economy.
I'm sure there is an effect when people talk on socials (linkedin, company intra etc) that they are marketing themselves. This is why I won't take any claims on socials that seriously.
I can't decide how much I like it myself. It can help me with really complicated projects. Software and otherwise. It has completely replaced my usage of non site local search engines. But I don't like how lazy it makes me. I don't vibe code, I understand what it is doing, and have it make adjustments typing it examples of what I want. But I can see myself getting lazier quckly. And when I find a task too hard for it I waste a lot of time trying to get my prompts correct before taking over.
>The AI product rollouts in the last two years have been some of the most aggressive and user hostile product rollouts in my entire life.
>I’ve had the worst customer experiences of my life in the last few months.
I attribute that to the massive amount of tax breaks and money that has been funneled to them by various governments. The government is the customer that they are appeasing right now. As soon as the spigot is turned off, they will be more inclined to appease us.
I do not know the consumer or b2b AI market well right now. I do know that billions of dollars are at stake from government sources. A smart company would focus on that.
Uhh, the entire contract is a form of corporate welfare. So yes, the DoW giving money to these companies is a handout.
Just because it benefits them doesn't mean it's not a handout, especially when said money could be used elsewhere for purposes that actually benefit everyone and not a dozen people living in SF.
I'm someone who makes extensive used of LLMs and agents for daily research, and I 100% of the time ignore the AI summary that google gives at the top of the page. If I am performing a web search, I've already decided that I'm explicitly NOT looking for an LLM summary.
I think Google's "AI Mode" does better at integrating search results and answering questions. It can find articles and scientific papers that match my memory in most situations and does a lot better at Arknights question answering than Microsoft Copilot (reskinned ChatGPT) does.
It should seriously be 100% illegal to force someone's content into AI training without their explicit consent, and no not opting out should not be an escape hatch.
Search is not the golden goose. Ads are. If search was the golden goose, they wouldn't be trying so hard to replace it with AI.
Just because Google used to do search as their main point of business does not mean that holds true today. Holding on to the false premise will only add to your confusion about their decisions.
Ads in Search make up a significant percentage of their revenue. It is also the gateway that gets people into the Google ecosystem.
Ads make the money, but Search is still the consumer facing product that brings people to Google and keeps them there. It’s so ubiquitous people don’t even think about it or notice it anymore.
I’m always surprised by how much people are still searching for stuff as we’ve moved from the open web to various platforms (Amazon, TikTok, Facebook, etc), but every time I see Google’s revenue breakdown I’m shocked by just how important Search still is to their business.
This is from 2024, but shows Search accounting for nearly 57% of revenue. Yes, this is made possible by the AdWords business, but without Search, that 57% goes away, unless that traffic goes to a 3rd party that is also using AdWords and Google were to make the same from 3rd party ads as 1st party. I find that doubtful.
> but Search is still the consumer facing product that brings people to Google and keeps them there.
And let's not forget, these are the same people that when searching for "eBay" will put an ad at the top of the results, linking to eBay, and then place eBay as the top search result.
I've found it hilarious that every single search engine does the same thing. You can do it even in Apple's App Store too. (Not seeing the scam I'm talking about? Search a few more times, it'll hit) How does anyone see this as anything but a scam? User clicks the ad? Get paid. User clicks the search result? No pay. Either way, the user gets the same experience. But why the fuck should any company pay for an ad when the user explicitly searched for their product? It's metric hacking. I mean what's their next move? Down rank the explicit result? When making more money requires degrading the product you know we've fucked up
>But why the fuck should any company pay for an ad when the user explicitly searched for their product?
If you don't buy out the top-place for the query, someone else will. In a better case a competitor - imagine Facebook Marketplace being the top result for "ebay". In the worst - a phishing site. The latter happens quite often for software searches.
There's a lot of reasons, but it's probably how Google makes most of their money - brand names end up being high value ad targets - at least 6+ years ago when I worked in that sphere of things (ecommerce, primarily). It's legit extortion.
I guess that's why - because extortion is immoral. Eventually, those paying the protection fees will eventually find someone better to pay or will stop paying when the protection doesn't show up.
Not sure this is better, but if they don’t pay, most of the first page will instead point to random unrelated competitors and the search result will become visually harder to find. It is basically legalized mafia tactics (“you’ve got a nice business, shame if something were to happen to it if you don’t pay up”) since supposedly you could pay someone else to SEO the site and achieve the same result without just buying ads
It’s basically a guaranteed way to get your term into the first rank.
When people run a simple keyword search without intending to visit the site itself, for example when eBay is caught in a scandal and you’re curious, you type “eBay” expecting a news link somewhere on the first page.
That and mafia-esque protection money basically
A lot of big tech behaviour, is very much like mafia behaviour. I always use that description, when people asks me what cloudflare does or how the spam network works. They sell both the problem and the solution and the most unfilterable spam always comes from those aggressively filtering legitimate stuff out (Gmail, Outlook).
This is not done by the search engine - eBay purposely bids to be the top ad for the search term “eBay”. It’s called cannibalization. They’re more willing to pay for the impression and potential click through than they are willing to give up the ad space to a competitor.
> This is not done by the search engine - eBay purposely bids
Bullshit. The bidding doesn't happen without the search engine. It is the choice in the search engine design, and how it incorporates bidding that creates the issue. The bidding can't exist without the search engine, but the search engine can exist without the bidding.
eBay was an example from the parent, insert whatever brand you want. It’s still called cannibalization and it’s something companies have stopped doing because they don’t see great results
> And let's not forget, these are the same people that when searching for "eBay" will put an ad at the top of the results, linking to eBay, and then place eBay as the top search result.
Do you see an ad when you search for ebay? I don't.
eBay stopped paying for placement on the term "ebay" more than a decade ago, and I believe the executive who made that call got a bonus. It's possible of course that they changed their mind later, but since there still isn't an ad on the term today, I suspect they didn't.
(Methodology: I opened Microsoft Edge, where I have no addons or adblocking or anything installed, went to google.com, and searched for "ebay". There are no ads in the results panel. There is a sidebar with some non-sponsored information provided; below that sidebar is a section saying "people also search for" that mentions Etsy, Shopify, Poshmark, and Mercari. That section isn't sponsored either.
As a point of comparison, I also searched for "mortgage loans". (Same window, new tab, google.com.) On that search, there is no informational sidebar, and the results panel begins with a section called "Sponsored Results" which occupies the entire vertical extent of the browser window. (And consists of all of four links, with blurbs.) Below the sponsored results is the AI overview, and below that are the genuine results.)
> It’s so ubiquitous people don’t even think about it or notice it anymore.
Which is kind of the scary hazard for Google. They made people notice search by their announcements. They drew attention to the thing people took for granted as just how things work. People suddenly have a reason to look critically at it. Google has to hope to god the attention they receive back is actually positive.
The main reason Google loved search was because it was the primary way they got your personal info. Now Chrome gives Googles your entire browsing history, Gmail lets them read your email, youtube tells them what you're interested in, android gives google your entire life offline and suddenly the only thing google search is good for is as just one more website pushing google ads.
AI is going to be great at pushing ads. Plus AI trains you to give google even more control. Instead of just presenting you with a list of websites offering different perspectives and opinions on something, Google can just tell you what they want you to know/think (or not tell you anything they'd rather you not know/think about). The more you get used to treating google like an oracle instead of a librarian the easier it will be to manipulate you.
They only dominate Ads because they dominate search if everyone leaves Search the ad business grinds to a halt as well. These are the ying and yang of Google.
Kind of. They dominate ads because the dominated search when they bought the successful ads company. By that point in time, they already had your profile built, and the further use of search just continues to enhance that profile. But now that ads has its own persistent tracking that dependence on search is not as strong as it used to be
People have reported a decrease in ROI from spending on Google ads already when they no longer control all the eyes and where you rank in what those eyes see when they search, that ROI will drop even more. People will stop paying for Google ads when the ROI is higher on other platforms.
Couple that with the fact that a lot of folks have moved their search to GPT or Claude once those platforms start taking in ad money... that budget will come from somewhere and that's likely existing Google ad buy dollars shifting.
There's a no ads in the Ai result though. And even if they add there isn't space for like 4 or 5 ad results like some searches can return. Some Google searches I have to scroll a whole screen away before I see a real result.
> My friends who previously had no interest in technology and never talked about it, are suddenly following tech news closely all because they hate AI being pushed so hard.
My friends who previously had no interest in technology and never talked about it, are suddenly following tech news closely all because they have fear of missing out on AI :(
> My friends who previously had no interest in technology and never talked about it, are suddenly following tech news closely all because they have fear of missing out on AI :(
One of my friend ended up spending too much time on Candy AI or some sort of AI companion thingy :/
That's been my experience too, both with friends and coworkers.
It would seem that the negative sentiment around AI is largely an internet phenomenon. I've yet to run into a hardcore "AI skeptic" irl. People seem either neutral, or enthusiastic about it.
I know developers that like it. Not in a hyped way like bosses do, but they do like it.
(I don't know anybody that is actually more productive because of it, but I know people that consistently use it successfully in small tasks.)
I also know people afraid it will make all code worse and their jobs a nightmare. It's harder to find those people because they don't say it out loud, but there are plenty who think this way.
I am way more productive at developing stuff with AI.
I know it's only anecdata, but it's one data point.
I'm a tech startup co-founder able to avoid all the bullshit around it and just build stuff. My favourite part is that I can go through the planning part, get a decent plan for the build together, and then go do something else while the LLM builds it. It also really helps with maker/manager time because the LLM is keeping the context, not me, so if I'm interrupted I don't lose track of everything and have to reload context.
My brother with no programming experience took some AI courses and automated adding products to his ecommerce site from his suppliers. Fetches images, converts them, categorizes, adds descriptions/specs in multiple languages translated via DeepL API, calculates prices.
He also tries to troubleshoot/debug stuff without calling me... and just asking me to choose right path offered by AI. I love it :) Because I usually make people wait and don't have much time outside my business hours to do additional tech stuff.
Nop - that is a niche site, every product is stocked locally and it is to immensely reduce time required to insert new products. And it is not to generate new information, but to add existing info (apart from translation but most languages are known to check).
Most people I meet in everyday life think AI is incredibly useful and use it all the time. I have run into a few people in real life who vehemently oppose it, and many more online, but out in the world, they appear to be a minority.
I've had conversations in recent months with several friends who are non-tech, "granola" type folks. They pretty universally expressed dislike for and concern about AI, but then when the conversation turned to whether they used it for anything, the all admitted that they do appreciate being able to use it for some tasks. I think it's complicated for a lot of people (myself included).
Meanwhile I've never run into anyone who actually likes AI in any form (except for my boss). Most people who dislike it aren't bringing it up at random. I'm sure it has to do with the circles you interact with and their demographics.
Perhaps they are, but I think what I think is odd is how many are simultaneously opposed to the effects of AI (data centers, environmental impact, job loss) yet also are daily, paying users of it even outside of work. I know several who are like that.
I wonder how many in that poll have a negative sentiment about AI, yet are also heavy users. There seems to be some kind of disconnect going on?
> I wonder how many in that poll have a negative sentiment about AI, yet are also heavy users. There seems to be some kind of disconnect going on?
Being a heavy user seems like it'd create a lot of resentment if you don't actually enjoy doing it.
If you have used a tool for years and years and suddenly it shoves in a bunch of AI, like Duolingo or Google, are you a heavy user who may well dislike the results?
I have to put in some work to not be a heavy user by any reasonable definition.
ChatGPT has been downloaded >1 billion times on the Android PlayStore. AI is incredibly popular.
People have all sorts of concerns about how AI will change society, but that's precisely because it's so useful for so many things. If it were useless or just a fad, there would be no reason to worry.
The startup where I worked had 1 million downloads (which is much less), but how many of those were using it daily vs trying it for 30 minutes and forgetting about it?
Odd not to see my main concern, which is gathering large amounts of human knowledge in a machine that is ultimately tweaked by the "selected" few not just for profiting off of it, but to also (ultimately) have a big influence on what is appropriate and what isn't.
This goes for most tech topics. Not long ago tech sites had users who were aware that their preferences as a tech person were different than the average person.
Then it became so common to be a techy person and surround yourself with other techy people that it was easy to fall into a bubble and not realize it. When all of your news websites, coworkers, social media feeds, and friends in the group chat all think the same thing it feels like everyone in the world agrees with you.
You see it whenever social media topics come up. On Hacker News there’s never ending confusion about how Facebook continues to exist because the common refrain is “nobody uses Facebook any more”. Leave the tech bubble, though, and Facebook has a massive number of active users and activity. Whenever I mention this it gets doubted, denied, or even dismissed as lies from Meta trying to inflate their stock price. The dismissals always come from people who proudly deleted their Facebook account ten years ago and therefore have no idea what happens on Facebook, of course.
One of my favorite comment sections this year was when a lot of people were recounting how their aunt or cousin or grandma used Facebook and actually enjoyed it, which attracted comments saying they must be a rare outlier. It just goes too much against the bubble consensus that everyone hates Facebook and has a bad time when they use it.
> Then it became so common to be a techy person and surround yourself with other techy people that it was easy to fall into a bubble and not realize it. When all of your news websites, coworkers, social media feeds, and friends in the group chat all think the same thing it feels like everyone in the world agrees with you.
FWIW I think it's a combo of people who spend all their time in online circles and and the effect on upvote sites where people try to appeal to the group sentiment to farm for votes. There's a lot of tech communities that consist of people who pretty much don't socialize in person and it was greatly exacerbated by the pandemic.
As a hardcore AI skeptic, no one has run into me IRL either, because I pretend at work to be neutral, except to the one other skeptic who also pretends to be neutral.
I'm in my 50s and all my friends and family hate AI. My parents in their 70s can't really comprehend it. They got used to search and want nothing to do with AI. Some company is trying to build an AI data center where they live, and they're livid about it.
Personally, I like it sometimes, but I'm a techie and understand the limitations, and I dislike not being given options to use or not use it.
> The AI product rollouts in the last two years have been some of the most aggressive and user hostile product rollouts in my entire life.
I’m getting extremely annoyed by the Base44 ads I see on YouTube every other video.
First I pressed skip all the time, but the ads keep popping up. So now, every time I see it, I click on the ad and then immediately close the site. At least I can make their aggressive ad strategy a bit more expensive.
Youtube revanced on your phone + ublock on firefox and you'll never see youtube ads again. There's also a replacement app for android TV that I forgot the name of that works well. Do not use chrome, google nerfed its ad-blocking capabilities a while ago
Up until about 2019, I did not block ads. I felt that the ads a site or service chooses to run was a pretty good way to gauge whether I wanted to continue to use that site or service, and ads are what cover the operating costs.
Over 20 years I got to watch a HUGE change in the ecosystem of advertising, starting with static imaged baked right into the page and transparent pop-overs at the bottom of YouTube videos. If an operator used horrendous popups, un-muetable audio, or other adversarial tactics I would generally just not use them, the internet is a big place, I can shop around.
By 2019 it got to the point that nearly every operator was using ads so large and offensive that nearly every website was unusable. Even YouTube had moved to multiple, sequential, un-skippable, mid-roll ads that made the viewing experience worse than cable. I installed a browser extension and set up a pihole.
I do however feel like this leaves things broken. There are very obvious holes in pages that look like some developer spammed line breaks randomly throughout the page. If operators moved back to static images or animated banners I would honestly prefer it to the disjointed look you get with no ads at all.
No, for a long time I never clicked. But since I keep seeing the freaking ads, I decided to click on them, because from what I understand they have to pay money for each ad click.
That’s what I told him… just set Safari to use it in Settings, but it seemed like he had already done it and was now invested in using a whole new app just to switch search engines. This is a symptom of the app-based model people now think in.
And that mindset makes this move even more risky. If people move away from Chrome to DDG, Brave, or Kagi Orion browsers which block tracking by default, then that will harm their ad income even more.
While there is a meaningful subset of the population that will do this, I wonder if the vast majority of people, even if they share the same negative sentiment towards AI and in particular how Google is pushing it in their products, will find the friction in changing up their workflows and routines to be too much to actually change things up.
While Google has certainly failed with their products before, by and large as a company they are "too big to fail" at this point so to speak where the myriad products they offer have become a very significant part of the digital infrastructure on which much of the world runs.
Anecdotally I've also switched to DuckDuckGo in the past because I didn't want Google looking over my shoulder on my browsing history (this was pre-AI), but I ended up coming back because I felt the search results weren't quite as good (or perhaps it was just in my head, and the differing UI was enough to throw me off).
And this may be a contrarian opinion, and while I hate the idea of Google mining all of my data and monetizing it, I actually find value in the AI 'previews' that Google provides (and will often ask it follow up questions as a means of getting 'free' LLM responses back for 'easier' prompts that I don't want to burn Claude tokens on).
I'm curious — how do non-techies know? During stand-up the other day I was making small talk like "hey did you guys know that Google search is dead" and everyone was like "it is?" and I had to link to the Google IO to prove it because indeed, doing a Google search worked the same way it always had.
So I'm wondering how other folks are finding this out.
> If Google isn’t carefully they’re going to push people away from their golden goose.
we have moments like this every few years (almost as frequent as crypto waves in recent memory), but they keep chugging along.
couple years back it was all about saying the GPTs have replaced search for people and how google is dead. now when they implement the same, it drives people away.
i can imagine how it can be difficult to be in their shoes, when any change is met with negativity. no surprise that the core interface has...had not changed all this time.
context: left to ddg almost a decade ago in a similar exodus wave.
All that being said the product is genuinely worse now.
The other day I googled "I'll be resolving" in quotation marks as I usually do when I'm unsure if it's idiomatic (or grammatically correct for that matter) English.
AI mode replied with: "I'm on it. Tell me what you're working on, and I'll jump right in with the exact steps, scripts, or details you need to tackle it! What exactly are you looking to resolve?"
Just give me the damn phrase used in a sentence along with the number of results so that I can assess how common this expression is.
I think this is very true. They probably got scared of the almost 1b weekly active users of ChatGPT, and how people would rather ask ChatGPT than use Google. It will be a balance but this is a great opportunity for smaller search engines to make a real comeback.
It can be set as the default search engine in Safari, one of the few options Apple gives for search engines. No need to change your home page. I told my friend this as well, but I think that idea was slightly beyond his current mental model of how things work on the phone.
I’ve tried using the homepage method before with Kagi, as the extension to set it as the default search is a pretty ugly hack. I found it created too much friction, as I’m often searching from an existing page.
Kagi phone app is pretty nice. I do all my searching in Kagi, the clicked results launch my default browser and the search results stay stable where they are.
DuckDuckGo makes a webkit wrapper with their branding. It does actually have some good features built in, but I don't recommend it over Brave or Mullvad Browser.
What I see is people using AI of their own free will, because it's incredibly useful.
It's true that inside tech companies, AI is being pushed into products, but outside of those companies, normal people are rapidly adopting AI for all sorts of daily uses.
"I don't know what this symbol on my dishwasher means." -> Ask AI.
"Why is my bread not rising properly?" -> Ask AI.
These are the types of things that previously would have taken a lot longer to figure out, but that you can get an immediate answer to with AI. That's the fundamental reason why it's taking off. Not because it's being pushed.
You can talk all you want about generalization and reasoning ability and AGI, but the fact is that it's also useful simply as a really user friendly database.
Even if it's only able to report facts from its dataset or perform simple synthesis of search results.
That it can actually reason to a certain extent is bonus points.
> If Google isn’t carefully they’re going to push people away from their golden goose.
Won’t be surprised if Google thinks their Golden Goose is terminally ill and AI is the replacement.
Google is really an information provider powered by ads. That’s what people use their search for - to get information.
Google’s search basically has the internet as its backend - information-wise. I think it’s inevitable that AI slop (output from low quality GenAI) will render it useless eventually.
So Google’s solution is to build their own AI with information curated by them to try to stay the front page of the internet.
I actually like AI mode in Google. My main reason is if I just have a quick question it seems a lot quicker than logging into ChatGPT/Claude as I can just type it in the address bar.
Of course DDG / others can do the exact same thing as they already have an AI mode. Maybe you can even set up ChatGPT as a search engine - not sure. The key for this use case is speed - it has to be nearly instant.
Kagi does this really nicely, you just add a question mark at the end and it'll add on top of the search results an LLM summary of what's been found. It's subpar in quality but more than enough to aggregate the results by theme
Yeah you'd need to support it in the term itself. So many queries coming from the url bar. As opposed to a toggle or something. I wonder if we have info on that - what percentage is input in address bar vs google homepage/app.
The problem is that's not discoverable though. The toggle on google.com would be nice but most people probably arent searching that way.
>I actually like AI mode in Google. My main reason is if I just have a quick question it seems a lot quicker than logging into ChatGPT/Claude as I can just type it in the address bar.
This is the exact use-case, and it makes a lot of sense. The hard part for Google is identifying when someone wants search and when someone wants an AI response. It's somewhat identifiable by the input but of course thats extremely messy to determine systematically.
They are already doing something like that though. It's not just a ? mark, but they are getting some signal from the input and classifying it as a search term or AI prompt. Not all inputs have an AI response.
And a "?" at the end is not going to capture a lot of real LLM prompts like "What should I pack for my vaction? Im going to Florida in September."
I mean you could do something like this. But it's really not much different than other manual search codes that are used by more power users like like "", "site:" etc.
They probably have a term for it but their AI response is just another "embedded result" for lack of a better term. Like displaying the local weather directly at the top when you search "weather", etc.
It was funny how the other way when I searched for "nvm" to look up Node Version Manager, the AI mode thought I was saying "nevermind" to it. It felt quite jarring.
The problem is that it’s both slow and treacherous. They can work on performance but the convenience is really undercut by it being wrong a significant amount of the time and incomplete even more frequently so I have to review the search results anyway.
If you use Firefox, then you can add chatgpt as a search engine with keyword gpt. Then you can type "gpt how to centre a div" into your address bar and get the same thing without routing it through Kagi, or needing Kagi.
It takes me little more than a second to open a chat session with an AI. I spend way more time asking my question that pulling it up. All I have to do is type two characters in my address bar the browser knows which URL I want. That's like VI command speed. Two letters... <Enter>... the website loads within a second, the chat text box is focused and I make my request.
I'm as anti-Google as anyone out there. I block all their ads, refuse to pay for youtube, go out of my way to avoid their hardware, etc. But I have to admit AI mode is great. It's fast, free, not yet cluttered with ads, and useful. I treat it as a search engine that does a fuzzy search rather than the more literal text match search that we're used to.
I recently bought a Bambu 3d printer after Reddit/HN drew my attention to them and AI mode has been really useful for me to learn about my new printer and troubleshoot things. There is so much information and I don't have time to read everything. I just want to ask a targeted question and have something summarize the literature's answers for it.
It will be a sad day when Google inevitably enshittifies it, but for now I'm happy for them to subsidize my expensive LLM queries.
I'm the same way, I hate using Google search for searching because it's basically useless, and their other ecosystem offerings generally get enshittified over time so it's not worth paying for or relying on.
But if they're letting me using AI for free without logging in and I just need a dumb AI slop answer, then I'm more than happy to burn their tokens instead of my own. Any serious work goes to a different LLM provider. The switching cost for moving to a different LLM provider in the future is practically zero.
"Surely the last time after handing out carrots long enough to kill all competition, they switched from carrots to sticks, that sucks; but look? now they started giving out carrots again!! It will be such a sad day when no more carrots"
“Someone’s handing out free carrots but it may be sticks someday so I’m gonna be mad about it today and grow my own carrots. That’ll show ‘em! My neighbor’s roasted carrots sure do smell good though.”
"I took their free carrots and now several years later, their carrots are a global ~monoculture that have been modified to grow faster but taste much worse. I don't like their carrots anymore but most other carrots are grown by small-scale local farms and can't be bought for cheap because the farmers never managed to get competitive economies of scale."
"I wish I'd supported the crazy folks who did carrot science in public and distributed seeds and allowed everyone to breed them so that we could all find better varieties for the common good! They still seem to be eating well."
(I see your very practical point, but I do think making the locally suboptimal choice in the hope of better long-term outcomes is a valid philosophical position.)
I also see the other side. I wish it wasn’t Google that currently has the best free product, because their well-oiled ad machine is going to inevitably turn the crank to find that sweet spot where the product is barely tolerable due to ads. But if I want free, fast, mostly correct lookups to plain English questions, what’s my alternative? Paying OpenAI or anthropic doesn’t seem to really change much. They’re going to do ads too. Abstain from AI entirely and continue to use non-AI Google search and take 10x as long to learn? Google still wins and I lose.
Me too. To be honest, I am not that interested in reading the first 5-10 search results to find what I am looking for. If Google can do that for me and summarize the main points, that's another 10 minutes of my life saved.
> Just for a start, visits to its AI-free search page noai.duckduckgo.com between May 20 to May 25 are said to have increased by 22.7% on average week-on-week, with the figures peaking May 24 at 27.7%.
> The DuckDuckGo mobile app saw installs spike in the US by 18.1% on average compared to the previous week. TechCrunch reported this growth was sustained over six days, peaking at 30.5% on May 25. An even greater number of iOS users hit download on the app though, with installs seeing an average week-on-week growth of 33% and a peak of 69.9%.
Why do they report only relative numbers? These numbers alone are meaningless. This is just lazy reporting.
They wanted to write a story where this was a negative consequence for Google, I suspect, but the absolute numbers wouldn’t have supported that (they mention that it is inconsequential to Google a couple paragraphs in, if your browser can sustain the site for that long. Mine had trouble).
Because it's an ad for DuckDuckGo and PCGamer loves anti-AI engagement bait outrage articles because they bring clicks from outraged "gamers" and this brings them ad revenue, too so you are reading an ad for an ad.
They used to have public-facing relative figures located on /traffic, but it looks like they got rid of that page some years back and now it just redirects to the homepage.
...because the absolute numbers are incredibly low. And I say this as a fan of DDG! It's just the reality we live in; those who are negatively polarized against AI enough to make this sort of change are just very small in number.
noai.duckduckgo.com probably receives much less traffic than the main domain, which enjoys placement in many prominent browsers (and offers AI overviews by default, although they are far smaller and less likely to appear than on Google). It would be much more interesting to see absolute numbers... in the context of the main site.
I love the way Kagi does AI - it defaults to a regular search, but if you add a question mark to the end, it will give you an AI answer. Additionally there is a small "quick answer" button at the top of all results that will give an AI answer if clicked.
Yeah, starting from a much lower baseline than DDG, I've had something like a 10x increase in queries last ~week. Seems like a lot of people are looking for alternatives.
For as much as how the startup space loves to pay lip service to contrarian bets, people sure do all be running in the same direction.
Seems cool. I'll definitely try using it. Do you have a shorter url? Its going to be an uphill battle telling people to check out" marginalia no not magnolia HYPHEN yeah hyphen not underscore or dash search DOT com"
- Search ad pricing is inelastic and auction based (supply goes down price goes up).
- A jump in traffic to DuckDuckGo does not mean Google is experiencing a decline in search volume. Number of queries per session has increased since launching AI Overviews.
> Search ad pricing is inelastic and auction based (supply goes down price goes up).
False. Advertisers have budgets and ROI targets. If Google cannot compete people will get their clicks elsewhere.
> A jump in traffic to DuckDuckGo does not mean Google is experiencing a decline in search volume. Number of queries per session has increased since launching AI Overviews.
But it does produce lower ROI for advertisers (in this case: CTR goes down because my ad is being shown to more people). Once user is on my landing page, my conversion rate is fine month on month (±1%), but my CTR on google got sharply worse by 5% since, and if it goes much further I'll stop completely on Google.
I doubt I am alone: Maybe others will jump ship sooner and the price will recover (demand goes down) but in either event Google is less net revenue, and given how aggressive their sales pushes have been I think it could be that big
That's users changing products in advance of a change, which is a relatively uncommon thing. We'll presumably see another bump when Google actually rolls out their changes.
I've been using Kagi for years and am not looking back. Okay, it costs money; it could sometimes be worse than Google, but the only free cheese is in the mousetrap.
The world seems to be fragmenting, into those that see the value in the latest from Google, and those that resist changes like this. I search for how much oil does my <ICE vehicle> take" and get the exact answer in a single sentence, or I suppose I could click the links and wade through all the validation for choosing <ICE vehicle> and how often one should change the oil, and which brand of oil that blog is pushing etc etc.
I love Google's AI answers and their AI Mode tab. DDG is just Bing or a search vendor proxy, so I've never understood the fascination. At least Perplexity is different to Google. DDG seeing a 28% increase is like Google saying they saw a drop of 0.0000000001% in traffic.
HN crowd forget that the world isn't like us, they didn't grow up with Yahoo and Alta Vista, with Excite etc etc. Our SOP is to resist all change, anytime Apple brings out a new version it'll be the end of Apple according to HN - Apple - the biggest company in the world - what do they know about UI, "Liquid Glass sucks!" :) :)
We're a community in danger of pushing out those new to the tech world, recent graduates will be made to feel unwelcome if we continue to trash everything that the biggest companies in the world do, like we always know better. I implore the community to be more positive about the future, about the technologies that will take us into that future.
> I search for how much oil does my <ICE vehicle> take" and get the exact answer in a single sentence, or I suppose I could click the links and wade through all the validation for choosing <ICE vehicle> and how often one should change the oil, and which brand of oil that blog is pushing etc etc.
Don't you have to do that _anyway_? Unless you're just blindly trusting the AI to be correct, and if that's the case, please do enjoy gluing your cheese to your pizza.
Yeah, but perhaps we're getting to the point where the AI synthesis of all reachable data sources is going to be more truthy than trusting whatever random anonymous result you pick from the top half of the results page.
I'm also finding that the AI-cited links are often more helpful and authoritative than the top search results.
I like having a direct answer to my question "how much oil does my engine take" but as of today I do not trust the answer to be correct, so I still cross check several sources, ideally ones that appear to be authoritative.
I asked claude to dig up the current Ford Bulletin for the engine in my truck to tell me the recommended motor oil. And it found the updated recommendations properly. I wouldn't trust google AI because I know specifically that the recommendations changed, and I don't want whatever the published specs were when the engine was first manufactured, which is out of date (and found on lots of low quality blogs). I don't even trust claude, but it gave me the URL to click on to verify and summarized it well enough that I mostly trusted that it wasn't using the cited technical bulletin and not a bunch of random AI-slop web pages.
I wouldn't trust any 'confident stochastic next-word predictor' to tell me fact. There are official sources of information for these kinds of car maintenance questions.
Better than asking your backyard mechanic buddy who believes that you don't need anything other than 10W40 or something like that. You have always had to know who to trust and what level of work you need to do in order to get to an answer which is satisfactory. And in this case, Claude cited the manufacturer's bulletin which is the actual best source of truth that you're talking about.
Right, but standard Google search doesn't find them reliably either. Instead you get answers from enthusiast forums, "quick oil change" franchise sites, SEO slop, and maybe somehing from the actual manufacturer site if you scroll down.
Being critical about AI companies isn't what's pushing new people away from the tech world. The AI companies and the consequences of their actions are, as well as comments like this pretending the issues don't exist and that we need to just be positive about the "future".
And supposing these technologies do take us into the future: when said future is bleak and worse in most ways than what came before, people aren't going to be encouraged or enthusiastic about the tech world.
> search for how much oil does my <ICE vehicle> take" and get the exact answer in a single sentence
How do you know the answer is exact?
> or I suppose I could click the links and wade through all the validation for choosing <ICE vehicle> and how often one should change the oil, and which brand of oil that blog is pushing etc etc.
Where do you think that "exact answer" is being scraped and averaged-out from?
Are you going to enjoy a future where those different sources can't be found, so now Google requires you to have a subscription that includes data about vehicle repair? The great thing about the web before was that the information was available for everyone, it was decentralized. This is what they are trying to kill.
> The world seems to be fragmenting, into those that see the value in the latest from Google, and those that resist changes like this.
This reads as a strongly closed minded claim that has been "whitewashed into corporate appropriate speech" by an llm. If you cannot understand any validity to the other side of a debate then you are not engaging in discussion, no matter how your claims are dressed up.
I've never seen such a reaction to Apple on HN. Quite to the contrary, there are a lot of fanboys here. A lot of macOS-only software is promoted here and I rarely see any complaints in the comments.
You're entitled to your opinion. But "we should embrace the stuff big tech is doing" does not follow from "let's be welcoming to new entrants to the field". They are, of course, welcome to their opinions as well. But even if they and I disagree on things, that doesn't make them unwelcome. So no, I'm not going to embrace the slop Google is putting out based on a spurious concern over welcoming newcomers.
Google's Search and its AI result can alternatively help or hinder me, I find.
If I'm looking for a relatively straightforward and simple piece of information quickly (e.g. "wooden arch mirror stores linden") then the AI summary can be useful, because I don't need more than surface level info.
If I intend to analyze and understand something (e.g. "developer API issues Zoho Thrive"), then the AI summary and the general degradation in the quality of search results from Google really hinder me. I have to work to avoid a lazy and low value answer, whereas what I really want to do is go through various actual websites and reflect on them to gain insight.
I feel like the second scenario was never good with Google. You had to go through several search results describing other problems, and there was a high chance you still didn't find anything relating to yours; and then, it wasn't guaranteed that a years-old problem got fixed.
If I have an issue with my Mac, seeing an Apple Discussions result at the top readies me for disappointment.
Meanwhile, I've found a normal chat with current ChatGPT to be very helpful, as long as it isn't about itself or other OpenAI products.
My usecase would be investigating a potential integration - I want to go and see everyone's comments on the websites themselves. I'm not looking for an answer - I don't know the question - I'm looking for understanding.
I find it to be a fundamental hinderance as they use a cheap model. The cheap model gets confused based on conflicting reddit threads and then I get a wrong answer.
It's better to just ask codex to do the search for me, but this is much slower - but increasingly my go to. I wish there was a fast search api codex could hook into to answer internet questions faster.
I switched to DDG about a year ago and it works fine for me. For some queries, Google still surfaces better results, but DDG is good enough that I don't really miss it.
The only Google service I haven't been able to replace is YouTube - no real alternative. I still use Google Maps as well, but could probably switch to Apple maps without missing much. For hiking trails, Apple Maps has often been superior. I briefly tried OpenStreetMaps years ago, but the lack of traffic data and the fact that it gave me bad directions made it untenable.
Very similar experience. As an example I had to user Naver and Kakao maps in Korea instead of Google and those apps gave me sort of another perspective that other apps can be better than G for sure. For youtube I have been fighting the addiction and eventually disabled all options around privacy and eventually reduced the use quite a bit as they do not render the feed of random videos and shorts anymore (just subs).
I genuinely find DDG more effective than Google Search. I have used it as a daily driver for 2+ years now. When i cannot find anything with DDG, i try with the !g macro, but results are more often than not even worse.
I switched away from Google to Duck a few years back. But I observed that I mostly do !g and end up on Google. I read similar comments from many others on other threads.
Recently I switched to Kagi and has been a very happy customer. I never visited Google after that. Only downside is the Search on mobile. You have to install an app and enable it as extension on safari. Logging in never worked and couldn't enable my premium Kagi on iPhone.
> Only downside is the Search on mobile. You have to install an app and enable it as extension on safari. Logging in never worked and couldn't enable my premium Kagi on iPhone.
I just have Kagi set a custom search engine in mobile browser - no seperate app needed.
Unfortunately the only way to do it on IOS Safari is as the user above described, you have to install and configure an extension, there are no 'custom' search engines natively. Other IOS browsers are fine, i.e. Chrome, Vivaldi, Orion, etc.
Google is better than Duck's backend (Bing or Yahoo, IIRC)
However, I find that most of my queries don't require Google to find the result. Maybe once every couple days I do a search, don't like the results, and then add a "!g". Most of the time it's fine and I get to avoid Google's ecosystem.
Yeah, same. Switched my default to Duck about a year back although I've still got Google on mobile (something I only just clocked as I type).
Google search had degraded so badly pre-AI, I was already finding it equivalent for most things. The odd few searches benefit from Google, but nowhere near enough to warrant them as a default.
I'm sure the model is fine, but it's not Google Search, and when I want Search I want Search. If I wanted to ask an AI, why can't I ask the one from my subscription... that I'm already paying for... that's actually good... that can also search the web?
I assume it's a play to test the waters for how the ad market is going to work, because as a product I really can't see why I would ever use it. Dropbox comment moment incoming?
They want to capture more of the value that was previously going to others. That's basically what this has all been leading to. Why let a cooking website get visitors and ad revenue when they are free to take the content and show it as their own? Now they are going to do the same to e-commerce. Either they are going to let customers buy their products through Google's interface, or they won't be discovered. No more ownership of the customer relationship. Stores will be a backend warehouse and manufacturer now with Google taking a percentage of all profits.
> Why let a cooking website get visitors and ad revenue when they are free to take the content and show it as their own?
I think this is a step beyond that - why should people be creating cooking websites when you can ask LLM how to cook given thing, while indeed, serving their own ads. It's the continuation of "we own content other people produce" policy
If you are half decent at cooking it is actually pretty helpful to explore cooking something new. Just like coding it is nice to get specific answers to your specific question and it is pretty easy to reason about the quality using your own experience.
I would be interested in an example of this. LLMs will often combine recipes from random sites. If you're experienced enough at cooking to reason about the quality _for something new to you_, what value is there in an LLM here? I don't see any similarities to coding here.
To me the similarity is I know exactly what I want to do but cannot really remember syntax (coding) or key variables (cooking) like temp and time. But I have enough experience to know if the output makes sense. Either one I can ask an llm a specific question and get a somewhat reliable specific answer that I feel comfortable parsing… this is actually one of the reasons I think I am eventually going to be on the local inference bandwagon. It is not far from being good enough for my use cases. And I will be able to skip the inevitable enshittification.
In terms of temp and time surely if you know enough to judge it's correctness, you would not need it in the first place? Code correctness is rather objective and easily testable. Cooking is rather subjective and only testable with great effort and time. I just checked 4 models on a 4lb pork shoulder in an oven. Flash was super off, suggesting you could pull at 145-150F for a sliced roast. Yeah, you could and it would fucking suck. The per lb time and total time also didn't add up. The others were better but varied. Only one (opus) thought to ask if it was bone-in. If you're very specific you could certainly have it aggregate a bunch of recipes to get a sense of what's close to a good answer, but ultimately it depends on what sources it chooses.
I could see LLMs being helpful to explore what's out there, like finding similar dishes or dishes involving a specific set of ingredients or dishes involving a particular technique, but a pretty poor tool for the actual technicalities of cooking or more importantly the uniquely personal aspects of food culture.
I dunno. I'd just buy larousse and on food and cooking.
I recently roasted a 5lb leg of lamb. Temp was pretty obvious but I had never cooked meat this way so an idea on time is really useful. Google search is a disaster for this kind of question. And I guess I have never encountered a good general cook book that I feel comfortable building off of.
I think all the science of cooking ones are a good bet for generalist knowledge. Some of the more textbook like ones as well. The food lab and on food and cooking stand out, but there are many others. I'm not sure I'd classify them as cookbooks.
Food lab, for example, covers buying storing and cooking lamb + a guide for a 5-7lb boneless leg across 5 or so pages. Kenji goes through great lengths to build intuition. I'm sure larousse, which is more of an encyclopedia, covers lamb quite extensively but it's probably more terse.
The internet can be an excellent source, but like most things it depends on who is writing it down.
I agree and this response was following OPs example. But the point still stands - the goal is to outsource, in a weird way, the results being served = Google as such wouldn't need to pay for content. Now, if accuracy of such sources doesn't matter (or is good enough) for casual user...
There are virtually no combinations of food which are toxic, you can mix any food with any food and, while it might not be good, it will still be food. (The only exception I know of is alcohol and mushrooms containing coprine, e.g. inky caps)
Point is, unless you're stupid enough to add glue or broken glass to your meal just because a recipe told you to, it's perfectly safe. More than just safe, LLM recipes these days are utterly boring in their normalacy, and, unlike cookbook recipes, can dynamically adapt to what you actually have in your pantry.
What really sucks is that Google pushed actual content creators out of the way in the first place. That is horrible. I think they should be challenged on this. Food bloggers, recipe writers, and creators have helped shape a huge amount of food culture, and they deserve to be protected rather than erased. If this kind of theft continues from the AI industry Im not sure what type of culture is is going to be left or what it is going to replace it to. I hope humanity is going to find a creative way around it, but I’m also aware how easy to manipulated the masses are.
Google already killed cooking websites - when it refused to show them in search unless they added long slop content to it. And it killed blogosphere when it decided blogs wont be found if they just contain content without deliberate SEO play.
And I think the rest of it will end the same way. People will be significantly less eager to do all that free work when no one will be able to find it.
You can also tell the LLM exactly what you have in the fridge or what allergies you have and get customized recipes.
It’s just a better experience, 2026 is rough for a recipe site.
I have/make rice starch glue. Can you put it on food? How are you supposed to know whether it's food safe?
Okay, so you don't trust LLM, so you go to a website instead. And... LLM-generated pages are SEO'd to get the top links. So you can't trust any website now (shoot, so much nonsense even before LLM, just more obvious to some of us). So basically everything on a computer is untrustworthy, directly from an LLM or not, unless you got yourself a copy of Encarta '97.
So you pick up a book at the local library. Librarians picked some books to order in subject matters they aren't expert in. How do you know those are accurate and safe? If the book says to use rice starch glue, how do you know the author didn't just copy that from an LLM? Or make it up?
Presumably you test some things and use common sense for others. Like if you search for "grain filling oak" using an engine like Kagi(because Google just sells you the same product repackaged over and over) then you'll get people telling you variously to buy this grain filler compound that worked on their particular project, or you get people telling you to use drywall patch compound, or watered down wood filler.
The thing is, these things do produce some kind of result that looks like what you want. But it is still up to you to test these things on a project before you rely on them for whatever it is you really wanted them for, and that requirement doesn't go away just because you sourced the information from some LLM, or a book at the library, or Nick Offerman, or whoever else.
This "common sense" you refer to, is it the same common sense Babbage was subject to?
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
AI got better over the last couple of years, and you didn't keep up, and because that's not going to stop, it will eventually become a problem for you.
The fundamental technology is still the same, just with more fossil fuel burning.
That's like saying the fundamental technology behind an Egger-Lohner Hybrid and a Prius are the same. Technically true, but if you use that truth as a basis for decisionmaking, you're doomed. A modern AI model wouldn't make such a foolish mistake, so you'd better not make it yourself.
This video tells me otherwise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDQds7VZkfg (
Cold Ones - We Drank AI's Horrible Cocktail Ideas). This is a tongue in cheek response though, as LLMs improved significantly since then.
In that case at least they could point out that end users got better results with AMP than they do with news sites w/o ad blockers. The AI results are just wrong so often I don't really get it.
The results are not wrong, they are AI. Google wants that to become a distinct thing that is neither. What's a better answer for Google than one that generates more usage? If we all push in the same direction we can make AI work, we just need to accept we will need to hold its hand for a while.
It's certainly long been clear that Google is phasing out even the idea that they serve end-users "links" to other websites. They're just refining the idea and making it more and more explicit. It absolutely places them in an obviously adversarial position to every single other website on the Internet, and anyone who continues to cooperate with Google today is probably handing Google the tools to put them out of business. Unfortunately, whole generations of people have grown up learning that the safest and easiest way to navigate to a website is to type some version of the brand into their browser (which Google likely owns outright) and click the first thing Google spits back, so Google enters this battle holding most of the cards :(
Exactly! They also have been letting the results of google search get seriously degraded by ads. Would many people prefer AI over google search circa 2010?
They killed their competition and now they will give you the product that gives them the most money.
Also — it's objectively a better search product to give users what they're looking for right away.
Though that's not to say they're acting altruisticly here.
Google seems to be racing toward a new dark pattern where users learn to trust rely on the AI for neutral, smart objectively correct answers — which boosts trust in its sponsored product recommendations. Super gross.
Then we should take your word over mine. My assumption was that those A/B tests will lead to products that do increase the numbers they were measuring (retention, conversion,...) at the expense of enshittified UX (up to the point of things feeling objectively broken, like notification badges re-appearing for the same items, settings that reset after user changes, search results missing,...). At least that was my explanation for how products by major tech giants like LinkedIn, Facebook, Outlook,... could end up being shipped with such flaws. What would you say?
This has been their MO with their search for a decade+ now. "Native" results hiding actual search results below the fold killed many 2010s era websites that relied on search traffic.
> but it's not Google Search, and when I want Search I want Search.
Not me. I really appreciate having both results simultaneously. I can scan the first couple sentences of the AI response, and if that already has the answer then great. I can expand it to see if there's more.
Or, if I see that the AI mode didn't understand my brief search query, I just glance at the search results below.
And often times, when I do need to follow a link, I find the source result links in the AI mode to be a better quality than the search result links.
Most of the time I'm looking for something very specific that there are plenty of articles about, but clicking on the articles results in popups, banners and an unhealthy amount of scrolling to get to the answer.
AI overview provides me the answer instantly.
Think about suff like "does china borders afghanistan".
In those cases you can be confident that the AI overview is right, and saved you time.
If it is a complex or niche question I tend not to trust the overview and go straight for legitimate-looking results
The LLM results are presented confidently and succinctly in a way that is designed to tell you “yes” OR, it not applicable, it just mashes together statements (which often leads to a response that contradicts itself one sentence later). That’s not the same as your vetting search results.
Well before Google screwed it all up there used to be some correlation between top hits and what you were looking for. SEO has muddied the waters for many years now and it’s never been truly “merit based” or “objective” or whatever we want to call it, but generally speaking, the first results were the best by default.
Ok, but it’s been mine. And clearly I’m not alone.
I feel like at this point any discussion about LLM’s has an implied “my experience” because LLM’s are super inconsistent due to not being refined tools at all. I’m sure your experience has been different, just like my experience has been different. I imagine you’ll want to chalk it up to operator error, but it sure seems like a lot of people have variations of my experience. If so many people are operating it wrong, then maybe the tool is poorly designed.
Understand that I use LLM’s pretty frequently. I am not “anti-AI.” I’ve used production tools incorporating machine learning for years now. But LLM’s simply aren’t the bespoke tools that these companies want you to believe, and they are definitely not a suitable replacement for search. It’s simply too inconsistent and will hallucinate answers. Google search didn't make up answers, it presented indexed sources that you ver in real time which I find to be a far superior way to do research. I don’t like having to guess when an LLM is just making shit up as it asserts something with simulated extreme confidence. Not only that, you can take a correct answer from a LLM and just start saying “know that is not right,” and it will start apologizing to you and generating other answers. That is a huge problem! I shouldn’t be able to “convince it” to give me a different answer.
Yes SEO made things objectively worse. Doesn’t mean we need to add another layer of issues on top of that.
It replaced some of my most used tools with google search. I used to be able to search "define inoculant" and I would get a definition, synonyms, and even a history of the word usage. Now it's replaced by an often mistaken AI summary. Even "inoculant synonyms" doesn't work.
According to Google, users are adopting it. They say AI mode is the most popular feature they've ever introduced, and is driving an increase in total search queries.
>Just one year after its debut, AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users, with queries more than doubling every quarter since launch. As people have realized just how much more Search can do for them, they’re searching more than ever before — so much so that last quarter, we saw queries reach an all-time high.
>Another place where we’ve been rapidly innovating is in the Gemini app. Last year at I/O, the Gemini app had 400 million monthly active users. Today, we’ve surpassed 900 million, more than doubling in a year. In that same time, daily requests have grown over seven times.
Isnt this essentially just slight of hand? Google basically defaults to AI search now doesn't it? So of course it will be 'fastest adopted' it's what is shoved in peoples faces.
If the results are garbage, or people have difficulty with it... Of course number of searches goes up. That doesn't mean the product is better or its not resulting in brand damage.
These are the same folks that removed the very useful Google cache feature because people weren't using it any more. What they forgot to say is they hid the feature beforehand.
Of course they have more AI queries every day. They have full control over what goes to LLMs and what doesn't.
While I'm not opposed to the idea that Google AI mode is so good that people use it more, I also feel like the average person only have so many queries per day. Google statement would indicate that people had a number of queries that they just opted to ignore, because find the answers was to cumbersome.
I'm not entirely sure I'm buying that, unless users keep prompting the AI to reduce the amount of reading they need to do. Sort of interrogating the AI, rather than reading a Wikipedia page.
In programming forums like Hacker News people are incredibly detached from the average experience with technology, sometimes it is buffling.
Most non technical people I know asked questions to Google even before the AI overview. Instead of looking for the answer in seo-bloated articles, they find it in the overview.
I think google should improve in detecting the kind of query when I need a link that I don't remember, and deactivate the overview on those. If I search for "ryanair booking" I clearly need the url for booking a Ryanair flight, AI overview is useless
The fact that users are using more search queries means they can't find what they want with a lesser number of queries. It seems that Google's PR team doesn't have an incentive to understand that, or thinks that everyone else is stupid.
I mean, "AI Mode" is the default result when you Google something, so of course they're seeing high usage. Driving an increase in total queries is probably because instead of just Googling something and getting the right results like it was 10~ years ago, now you have to interrogate a chatbot or try multiple queries. I would think higher total queries is more an indicator that your search function isn't effective.
> Driving an increase in total queries is probably because instead of just Googling something and getting the right results like it was 10~ years ago, now you have to interrogate a chatbot or try multiple queries. I would think higher total queries is more an indicator that your search function isn't effective.
I wonder how much the search results thing is related to language and locality. I have a hunch but I haven't really dug into it.
I live in the US, I speak English, and my browser is normally chrome.
The number of times I've gone to the 2nd page in Google search results you can probably count on one hand in the last 15yr or so.
I use the standard Google search things when I want specifics... Using quotes, site:news.ycombinator.com to search a site, or add a "-" to remove results from that site. I use a "+" when needed. Nothing fancy.
When people say they can't find things in Google search, I'm genuinely baffled. I have a strong suspicion that it has something to do with the combination of browser, locality, and language. Why? Could be tons of reasons for that, some probably anti-competitive on the browser side.
I have tried to use ecosia, start page, duckduckgo, etc. Was never happy with those results and always ended up back at Google search.
I just want to know what's different, you know? I look up some pretty obscure stuff sometimes.
Note: I do normally have my Google account logged in in the browser when doing search, however I have search personalization and history turned off, so that should not be influencing the quality of my search results compared to whatever "baseline" is.
It started when Google made a hard push to improve search for everyday people. They essentially nerfed "expert google skills" to bolster "noob google skills".
Regular people are/were really bad at using google, so google moved towards showing what it thinks you want rather than what you want. They paved over the skill gap between people who understood keywords and word order, and people who just typed in a quasi legible sentence to find something. In doing so though, they killed a lot of skill that people had developed with google for years.
Basically they made the game worse for pros so it could be better for amateurs. I have never heard a non-tech person complain about google getting worse over the years, and they seem to overwhelmingly use AI overviews now too.
> they seem to overwhelmingly use AI overviews now too.
Hard agree. The only thing I've ever witnessed another person do on Google (this is only an incredibly slight exaggeration) is:
1. Type a 'query' - either a brand/website name or some kind of stream of thought like "dishwasher error 03F" (without quotes)
2. Click or look at the very top thing in the results.
This used to mean 80% of the time they'd click the top ad, 20% the top organic result. Then they started putting non-clickable "answers" in that top spot, which would always be accepted as 'the right answer'. When those appeared, approximately no one would ever click any 'blue links.' These started out pretty reliable because they were just direct extracts from sites like IMDB: "Brad Pitt is 44 years old" etc.
Now it's like 60% of the time an ad, 40% of the time their bargain-basement-model "AI Overview" slop. Either way, approximately all users always just use whatever is on top and ignore everything else.
>"a hard push to improve search for everyday people"
Citation needed. A hard push to change their search offering, sure. To improve it? Well, if by improve you mean 'require more interaction and viewing of more adverts on average before leaving' ...
Again, if you have been on HN since 2009, you are likely on the far fringe of Google's user demographics, which at this point is pretty much "The average human being on Earth".
I would bet all of my money that you never once did a Google search (pre-LLM mania, but maybe even after) that looked like
"What kind of clothing is best for when you are going hiking around the lake, so my feet don't get so cold?"
Sadly, this is how most humans have used a search engine for decades now.
Fwiw, I do/did plain language searches for the last couple of years, following Google's lead - I think the more natural language searches have only really been in the last 5 years.
I often use terse searches too, mostly when I forget to write it out longhand to satisfy Google - but either way it's getting less wheat with my vat of chaff in the SERPs and several times recently I've had to re-phrase to get anything useful.
How do you get the inclusion/exclusion to work? My last few attempts to use “-x” really didn’t exclude what I expected, and almost all the results had “x”. I have seen massive changes since 2005.
Yeah, seems obvious that more searches = results are worse. Who would go "Google sure is good nowadays, I'm gonna ask it for more things than I used to"
I think it's a multifold problem and they've chosen bad solutions.
1. To protect ad revenue they make search results worse to increase the number of searches by making people refine their searches. This made people upset because search result quality went down.
2. "AI everywhere!" put them in a panic, so they shoved am LLM into results, hoping it could pick through bad results and give good data to the user.
3. LLMs are expensive to run, so they're using a cheap model.
Cheap model + bad results = abysmal user experience.
There are too many groups with opposed interests fighting. Ad groups wants worse results so people search more (not realizing this just drives users away). Search groups want a better product so they stop losing users, and the AI group is being given a bad name because management is using their worst AI product on search. So the whole experience is just garbage.
>1. To protect ad revenue they make search results worse to increase the number of searches by making people refine their searches. This made people upset because search result quality went down.
Why would this work? Were yahoo and askjeeves sandbagging their results too just so they can get more clicks?
Humans are predictable and hate change. For a short while it DOES work, people are used to great results, assume they're not using the the best keywords, and they'll reformulate their searches. For a while. After a while of all searches being not as good as they used to be, people start looking for other alternatives, which is why DDG is seeing an uptick.
It's called enshittification. It's easier than improving a product.
> Were yahoo and askjeeves sandbagging their results too just so they can get more clicks?
I don't know how much control Goog has over Youtube despite owning them but I do note in passing they removed dislikes, removed upload dates (apparently?), removed 5 stars. Easier to trick people into ads
The platform has been various kinds of hostile for a few years now
They probably lose a ton of traffic to AI or anticipate that happening. This is a way to keep people on Google search.
Like you, I use both search and AI separately. Even casual, nontechnical users are starting to work like that. Including AI with traditional search results will keep a lot of users from jumping ship in the first place and will help win back users from ChatGPT.
I know a lot of people hate AI - at a minimum, there’s a vocal minority - but the reality is AI is eating search like nothing we’ve ever seen.
Slight digression: Claude/ChatGPT/etc all can search the web, but Google's AI already has a local copy of the web. It's much faster because of Google's TPUs, but also because Google has a copy of almost the entire web available locally. I recall others testing this and they observe that Google doesn't actually make HTTP requests to sites it references. It just uses its local cache. That's an advantage that all others seem to lack.
Of course, I agree that when I want search, I want search. But personally I've found if I want an LLM to very quickly answer a simple question, the type of thing all of them would do an equally good job on, I prefer Google's for its sheer speed.
I find it useful, and use it almost daily. Helps answer "how to" questions for working on my house, development or just general questions. If I need more info, I just look at the links or videos which are also right there.
On the flip side I retrained myself to ask llm questions on my phone or computer browser search bar with the expectation of getting an llm response toy question with no desire to look at anything else.
If I truly want to search I will ignore the llm results, but I like the convenience of a quick llm search that knows "all the things". I get the answer to my question without searching multiple ad-ridden websites (since the ad provider does all the things)
Maybe we use search differently, but I very often don't just want an answer, I want to find a website to help me. Maybe it is because I need to do business with a company and need to find their website to interact with them, or maybe I saw a cool site awhile ago that's relevant to what I'm doing now and didn't bookmark it (because I dropped that habit when Google search was good), or want to read the official documentation about a product I bought, that someone already put a lot of effort into making complete enough and digestible to a wide audience... and the LLM responses tend to get in the way.
Like the parent I use good/paid AI when I want an AI response. So, yeah, an omnibox that knows when I want "an answer" and one that knows when I want to find a thing sounds slightly more convenient than switching between two tools, but Google search is not that Omnibox.
I dont think about less keypresses though - google search would let you type two words and get the thing you know you want, an ai search doesn't really fit the mode that old school search folks were using
You really want to read the author's life story when searching for a recipe? Or wade through some content marketing plug for some vacuum cleaner shop in Albuquerque when all you want to do is figure out how to change filters on your vacuum? There are definitely gems on the web out there, but chances are I'm not discovering them via search, and I'd rather get the straight answer from the AI.
I thought the same at first, but now I find myself relying on the AI answer (as it is usually reliable) and, also more and more, I continue interacting in the AI mode on the topic that motivated my search in the first place.
They see AI killing the incentive for anyone to produce human-generated content so they're squeezing the last few bucks out of the internet as we know it before it finally goes belly-up.
My read on it is "AI is taking over internet content generation, and we can't filter because we'll end up filtering everything that makes us the most money"
I don't disagree with you, but google search has gone so downhill that I had stopped using it before they moved to the AI approach, which is actually pretty decent.
...and it really hasn't been for a good number of years now. I left a while ago when results were all SEO copy pasta blogs this is just a final nail in the coffin.
I imagine most people aren't actually searching the web these days. They're searching for an answer to a question. They already now the 5-10 websites they use and go to those directly. They're mostly living in walled gardens, streaming services, or Amazon. When they use Google they want an answer and AI provides that.
Soon, the internet will be so completely full of AI crap enabled by the mega corps that search will be quite a bit less relevant anywho. Maybe google is trying to front run the demise of the internet that they were supposed to protect?
The intention is to kill the web in its current form, obviously. If only 1/3 of their users have left, then it is still a win for them in the long run, as they will gain the fraction of content they directly supply to users. Singularity is here and it's spreading faster than a cancer.
Because Google wants to kill off its search engine here. It is very clear.
> I assume it's a play to test the waters for how the ad market is going to work, because as a product I really can't see why I would ever use it. Dropbox comment moment incoming?
This assumes that Google search is still a high priority for Google. With their privatized adNetwork, they are trying to get people to trust them, and abuse users
via their ads. That is their business model. Google is an adCompany. It stopped being a tech company many years ago already.
Also they control the adMarket for the most part. Just look at youtube.
From my experience the Google AI mode is more restrictive on what it will let you search for and the content it produces.
I personally have had to use DuckDuckGo to search for things that Gemini finds to be against its instructions to answer.
And I'm not talking about things that are NSFW, but some things that Gemini just doesn't want to discuss.
That's kinda Gemini's problem in general, it just is overly restrictive and doesn't like to talk about anything things that Claude will freely talk about and push against and discuss with you.
I direct a lot of questions to LLMs, but I want to ask a high-quality model, not the crappy one that Google uses to answer queries. If I'm typing something into Google, it's because I want a search result, not an LLM answer.
I've actually changed that. When I type something into Google it's because I want an LLM answer - their search results have been useless for a while now. But that's only because I rarely use Google these days. I'm mostly using DDG to search (I might try Kagi at some point). Google is relegated to my phone when I want a quick answer where accuracy isn't critical without needing to scroll through a bunch of search results/open and read websites on a small screen.
Kagi, unfortunately, is getting worse too. I think mainly because they don’t get access. But I’m not sure. I had to fallback more and more to Google, because Kagi couldn’t find exact matches, while Google could. Like texts which I copied from a webpage (for example from Android’s source), and it can’t find it.
Its search results ordering is quite good, but the accessible information for them seems to be shrinking. And quickly.
I’m at the point where I don’t search for complex things anymore. I use Kagi for things which can be found with any search engines. Not because I chose it, but because I was forced. This was not the case a few years back, when I started to use it.
Btw, there was one thing with which Google was superior all along: define <word>. And they fucking killed it in the past months, for a far, far worse solution. Nothing comes even close.
I do have to say, and this is from recent observations, not outdated ones, but their AI summaries get things wrong, alot, and these are things that gemini (proper), Claude, or ChatGPT subscription AI's don't get wrong.
If I'm typing something into a google it's usually so I can be hit with a Captcha on my home internet connection and then get search results that aren't even any better than DDG. And DDG has a LLM as well.
You've got the captcha issue as well? Seems like it's happening constantly now. I suspect Apple Private Relay has something to do with it, but I'm not sure.
If Claude starts sending queries to Google then Google makes you use captcha from that IP, likely you have been using such a bot and it sent queries without you knowing.
I wonder if the 28% more visits was mostly among existing users. I skimmed the article and it didn't look like this was broken out. It would be much more impactful/impressive if they brought in a bunch of new users, as opposed to ratcheting up usage among people who were already aware of it.
It's difficult to put my finger on it, but there is something about Google's AI UX that I deeply dislike. It has nothing to do with the quality of the response, which seems fine, but...
The header and input bars are too big. The max width of the response is too narrow. The font is too large. The way it renders onto the page feels weirdly clunky. There is a whole sidebar in addition to the top bar just for two buttons. In the + button under user input, they hide everything under there like model selection even though there's a ton of real estate to the right of it. Everything feels unnecessarily cramped on the page in spite of ridiculous amounts of whitespace.
Yet my ultimate dislike feels like something more than the sum of the parts. It feels like the Yahoo of AI. Anyone not relying on distribution advantages would know they need to do better.
It really speaks to Google's perennial weakness: they can never seem to make an incredible UX.
I guess that's because they hardly ever build a product that's really theirs. Google Cloud came in response to Amazon (who built AWS because they needed it themselves), Gemini came in response to ChatGPT, etc. and it always shows
I'm not sure why people go with DuckDuckGo as their engine as it's just trading Google for Bing. After learning about their deal with Microsoft, I started using Brave Search instead.
It's also pretty ironic for people to ditch Google over ai just to move to another search engine that has AI by default unless you happen to know about the noai subdomain. But it is good that people are willing to break the habit and try alternatives. That's what Google should be scared of.
28% more of 100 users is still nothing ... who actually uses DuckDuckGo? It seems at least in the german market not relevant and a clone of BING anyways.
For the search, some of the local results are wrong but I live in a very small area so it may be more reliable for highly populated areas. Lately I've been checking out Kagi for a few things just to see what the quality is like on competition. The anonymized chat (proxy) for AI is cool but very small context limit. Good for looking up random questions and they typically include references.
I already submitted my take on this to Show HN: https://currantfeed.cc/. Noone gave a shit so it's most likely a very bad idea and certainly a very steep uphill battle. It's basically an Airbnb for websites that by default randomly sorts them and then you can filter by different attributes. Owners have to submit and maintain their "listings". It does have an optional subscription (I'm not sure if it works haven't tested it).
I rarely use Google for search, but I've actually gone back a few times just to use the AI search function. Occasionally it is useful, especially when I can't think of the correct term to search for.
But recently I had an entertaining experience with it. I was trying to apply a math technique to an application it wasn't normally used for, and I figured that somewhere out there was a paper or two explaining how to do what I was attempting. So, I tried Googling, and the response was something like:
"You appear to be working with two completely different areas of mathematics, which have absolutely no connections between them. That's fascinating! Would you like to know more about either of these two completely separated subjects which have nothing to do with each other?"
Not useful, Google, but definitely good for a laugh.
I read it because it's shown before search results now but I have to stop myself to not accidentally rely on it. Had two times it misinformed me pretty blatantly and its links to sources are wrong a lot.
in case this point hasn't been made -- what was the baseline for the 28% more visits? duckduck go has like 1-2% search share. So, if there is even a small group of opinionated users who flee google, that would make a big difference. We can't conclude as a result that everyone hates the AI push.
Google has 90% market share. DDG has 0.7%. I don't have a POV on whether AI mode is good or not, but surely there's gonna be some people who dislike it, and even if that's a tiny percentage, it can be a huge boost to DDG.
A large fraction of the people using Google probably have no idea DDG exists. So the backlash is likely significantly larger than just the 0.2% who left to this search engine.
To be honest I use Google AI mode a lot. And Duckduckgo for private search. I default to DDG and use !g if I want to resign from privacy or find some merchandise to buy
actually yes. Google has better mechanism of finding the products I am looking for. Some would say this is serene acceptance (fifth stage of grief). Also when tuning my browser too much towards the privacy, I kept getting mugged by "please show all the bicycles on the picture" for too many times, so I acknowledge I will be shoved up in my a...throat with new models of the washing machine I've just bought, and the sexy lingerie for some reason, that I'm not really sure of.
It's the french open. There's always been a bug with google search where sometimes I have to search 'french open' or 'australian open' twice to get it to give me the google scores. That bug still exists, sometimes it just brings up the site, but now it will also sometimes just go into AI mode and it will refuse to get out of it. Like even when you click for otherwise, it will force its way back.
The google live scores is a great feature. But when it's not coming up, even googling "french open google live scores" doesn't just bring it up every single time. It might if you try, but try multiple times over the day...
I like the AI mode, but only because Google intentionally destroyed their search engine. There wasn't any real competition back then, but now everyone has access to AI. They're frantically trying to keep their search engine customers.
Years back Google temporarily put their old database from the good times up for searching. You could actually find technical results reliably. It was so nice.
Makes sense to me. When I use Google, I am interested in getting the information quickly and in the right length and format, and am not interested in navigating to particular page(s) and looking up that info myself. Perhaps this will impact Adwords revenue in the long run but Google will find a way out. If Google didn't have AI mode, I would've stopped using it completely.
I dislike the AI summaries always popping up. I do now see an AI mode button. But so far I am not forced into AI mode. Is this happening for other people?
I'm seeing the same increased activity around my search engine project (https://github.com/asciimoo/hister). While Google's decision is very controversial, it's good to see that people are seeking for alternatives - nice motivation boost to keep developing alternative search projects.
I've been using it a lot in recent months, even though I was very critical about this in the past.
Of course, asking it to give yes/no answers or specific numbers is asking for trouble, but finally I can let something else read the SEOed garbage, point me in the right direction and let me browse the search results in a much more pleasant way than before.
I'm in these stats I think. But mostly because I was trying to do an exact search ("something to search") and discovered that google just ignores it.
There's a local search engine with a motto that translates to something like "Find what you don't know." Google has seemingly adapted "find what you don't want."
I finally switched to duck duck go, not because of the AI push of google, but because of the constant nagging popups to download the google app. Just let me google things in mobile safari in peace!
Oh thank God, I am not the only one here, I mean idk why but I am still not so comfortable with AI mode,and I just need Search, like good old search. I feel this all started when people were saying things like google search is dead or gpt will take over..
Wait, Duck Duck Go has some 50 million MAUs and that went to 65 million MAUs or so. Google has 5 billion MAUs, so some 15/5000 users went to Duck Duck Go. That doesn't seem damning. 99.97% of Google users didn't go to DDG.
it's a solution looking for a problem and google are desperate to stay relevant there.
We just don't need to search as much. But I _do_ still want to search sometimes, it's still a valid use case, just not as important as it used to be.
But when a do search, I want simple, relevant, external search results so that I can go straight to those good sources. Google isn't satisfied with their returns on that though.
Duckduckgo is blocked in my country. Reddit is blocked in my country. My country is also one of first countries agree to ban free (non playstore) android app installation. My country is so against freedom. What a shitty country.
... DDG had .7% marketshare (https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share). 28% more visits would take it to .84%. Assuming those all come from Google, that would mean .16% of Google users didn't love AI mode enough to switch.
Well... it is still a huge relative increase. And who knows where it could lead them, if they can sustain that sort of growth on a weekly basis...compounding and all...
I remember when I watched a presentation from a Google engineer at a summer school for AI tech last year and I asked why Google shipped AI slop when no one wanted it. He tried to gaslight me saying "users like this feature", and I told him to look up every major forum on the web, there is not a single good comment about Gemini being forced on. Then he said it was just an A/B testing and that not everyone had it enabled by default.
I wouldn't be surprised if they made up the statistics to justify the enslopification.
Even if the backend is bing, they have somehow made it work.
It's is a weird bonus for Microsoft.... If they don't try to copy google they can finally get some search market share!
LOL.
Hopefully this will inspire new teams to create indexed based search alternatives that are free and not enshitified, like google used to be in the early 2010s.
As someone who has been driving DDG for the past 6 years, i have switched to Google back due to the new AI mode,, its such a nice quick way to check information and validate ideas.. no friction included.
AI is like sex. I don't mind it, heck in the right situation I'm quite partial to it. However, if you keep trying to sneak it on me while I sleep, keep trying to slip it into agreements, keep involving people i didnt consent to being involved etc. The whole thing takes on a very ugly vibe. In fact I'm going to grow to be quite hostile toward it. Consent matters, not that I'd expect that lesson to land within silicon valley, second most rapey place in the USA after LA.
The top of every google search result is a confidently wrong chatbot now. It feels like Google has sacrificed correctness, the thing they were great at, the thing that built their search engine into the biggest internet service in the world, in the name of AI.
The same people who told you Google was going to zero three years ago because Search would become irrelevant are now telling you users will move away from Google because it’s removing Search.
When will people learn that the quality of Google’s leadership is better than that of the average Joe on Hacker News or a random tech journalist writing clickbait articles?
Looks like you're making the common mistake of counting all people you disagree with as the same person. In this case they're clearly different - AI proponents and AI skeptics respectively.
I'm calling out the "tech opinionist community" broadly speaking. I don't know if it's the same exact people but it's often the same forums or news outlets.
I use a mix of Bing (as Edge Is my daily driver) and duckduckgo, and i have to say I rarely need to use Google.
I don't think that's because they are better search engines, but because their usage covers 99% of my queries and some AI like perplexity covers the remaining 1%.
I use DDG but the problem I have with it is that, well, the results just kind of suck. I have slowly used the "!g" operator more and more over the years to the point that now probably 95% of my DDG searches are just Google searches.
AI snippets are just terrible, I always just scroll past it. I want to find the website I'm looking for, if I wanted to use AI I'd open up an AI app or website.
If you want to use DDG then go for it. Let people enjoy things, I say. But let's not pretend DDG is suddenly surging, or even relevant really. It's a niche service largely for virtue-signaling by people who insist that "Google sucks". That's their core demographic.
Some Googling claims DDG gets 145M searches per day and claims Google gets ~14B. Well, 14B translates to ~162k QPS. I know for a fact that Google's traffic is significantly higher than that so I'm not sure where that claim comes from.
I honeslty don't believe a significant percentage of Google users even know Sundar made a statement about people loving AI mode or would even care, one way or the other. This is just more marketing fluff trying to will DDG growth into existence.
I am trying to find a replacement for google search.
DuckDuckGo was also useless. Qwant just copy/pastes Google's awful UI.
We kind of see that all search engines suck now, but in many cases there
is no real reason why that should be the case. For instance, why did Qwant
copy/paste Google's horrible UI? There is no logical reason for this other
than trying to bait in people who like the Google search UI. I don't like
that UI Google chose since like 10 years or more; Google ruined its search
engine already way before AI.
We really need a search engine that works and isn't control by a greedy,
Evil adCompany. DDG isn't the answer; neither is Qwant.
This has been my issue with DuckDuckGo from the start... it needs to be something a little more catchy and that rolls off the tongue. Saying "I'll DuckDuckGo it" feels so clunky.
As small of a gripe as it sounds like, it really does matter.
I'll have to see Google's stats as well. I went the other way leaving DDG for google AI mode. I use ddg still if I just want it to find a site. if I want answers, I use Google.
I would say it's more than visits that count, how many people are staying in the DDG or Google home page doing things? a lot more with Google I'd think. they've succeeded in trapping me in their product, instead of navigating away, and I'm happier for it. And... i still don't get what people's problem is (quality wise that is), you don't have to use AI results right, and it's pretty obvious what the AI interaction portion of the page is? I'm sure ad blocker extensions can remove it entirely as well. DDG's quality is not just lower, it requires me clicking around to get AI assisted summary.
I just don't get it, is people's time not valuable? even if half the time the AI results are wrong, it offsets (for me - and it's more like 5%) the time I waste clicking on random sites, some of them ad-trodden (where a blocker isn't available), outdated,etc.. and I usually don't even go to the second page of the result where as the AI reviews more than the first page or two to give me a summary. I'm saving lots and lots of time, getting more done with it.
This is tech, not religion, but it feels like people are conflating the two. it's just a tool that's used to search things.
Alternative search engines are popular with the tech/HN bubble. Other than Bing, they have no palpable market share. Google does not care about said bubble because it mostly overlaps people who would use an adblocker anyway and who are capable of finding their way around other for-profit restrictions (i.e. downloading videos with yt-dlp instead of paying for YT Premium).
DDG has <1% market share, so +28%, while encouraging, means nothing for the monopoly. I use it. I use Brave Search as well. Paid for Kagi for a while.
But getting people to use anything other than Google (or the default Bing for on Windows) is nearly impossible at scale.
Google is the OG of enshittification. When DoubleClick bought Google, I mean when Google bought DoubleClick, that is when Google started printing money in exchange for a terrible user experience.
Google bought DoubleClick in 2008. That's nearly 20 years back. Either you're suggesting Google Search has been bad for 20 years, or you're just being willfully ignorant.
You know what is crazy, that this whole bullshit "MDC" garbage "API" that websites and stuff like Outlook have is stuff that they could have had by having SIMPLER settings in their services, they obfuscate them like hell then they give the "solution" simple API to agents so that THEY can easily use their services, but not humans.
AI summary isn't bad at all, but people don't understand it and Google hasn't explained it very well. It is just RAG. It is a summarization of the documents that are on the first page of the SERP. People think it is answering their question independently, but that's not what it does. It takes the docs that are top ranked from web search and digests them.
The corresponding "AI overview" feature of Gmail is amazing. It digests the messages that match your search. Because it is using your own docs, the output is way better. Or, at least, mine is. Maybe your inbox is full of lies but mine isn't.
People understand it. They dislike it. Users want what they want. When Software companies purport to know better... they do themselves and their customers a disservice.
My friends who previously had no interest in technology and never talked about it, are suddenly following tech news closely all because they hate AI being pushed so hard. One was just messaging me this morning about alternatives to Google search and maps. He ended up downloading DuckDuckGo.
If Google isn’t carefully they’re going to push people away from their golden goose.
The AI product rollouts in the last two years have been some of the most aggressive and user hostile product rollouts in my entire life.
All conventions and user centricity go out the window with AI feature launches lately. If you look at examples from the last week it’s stuff like posthogs opt-out training, Copilot training, or Google’s antigravity chat-app switch.
I’ve had the worst customer experiences of my life in the last few months.
My health insurance company decided calling support meant I consented to them saving my voice for model training. They said you can opt-out online, but that option didn’t exist in app or on their website. It was only after calling back and threatening to sue that they added an option to opt-out.
This is the daily experience now. Seemingly every company is opting you into selling your data, breaking your workflows, disabling features you use, and force installing AI integrations you have to fight to remove. And several companies are perfectly fine to reenable or reinstall them after removal.
It should be no surprise to anyone people are mad.
What real value AI does have has been poisoned by premature rollouts (training users it’s crap) and forcing it on people too aggressively.
After-the-fact opt-outs are something I never trust. Most data selling is opt-in and requires the user to opt-out. It seems to me that when I submit the form, the data would be instantly sold and by the time I get to the opt-out form it’s too late.
If this isn’t how it works, I’d be interested to know. The whole idea of these opt-outs seem like smoke and mirrors to act good while still gaining the advantage from the dark pattern. The only way to truly opt-out is to not register or use a service at all. There really needs to be legislation around this.
That's how it worked the last time I bought a car. I submitted the opt-outs with the purchase paperwork, the ~sales~ data sharing agreements with 10k of the dealership's closest, paid friends were processed first, and I had no end of bullshit from a hundred companies I'd never interacted with previously.
That sounds lawsuit worthy. If you submitted both sets of paperwork at the same time, a reasonable expectation would be for your opt-opt application to be processed first, otherwise it’s pointless.
The GDPR specifies that opt-outs are also retroactive, but of course we know that all corporations happily follow the law.
You can’t un-sell data though. Sure you may ask nicely that the buyer doesn’t use it and deletes it, but at that point the cat’s out of the bag.
In praxis, yes especially if it has already left the jurisdiction.
Disregarding that, laws don't apply to the first processing party only. If you keep data, that you got informed are not consented to anymore, it is the same as if you keep selling fenced goods.
I'm not sure the entities buying that kind of data care too much.
Corporations seem deathly scared of GDPR, for some reason, while in reality it's enforced about as much as American antitrust (not at all).
Same goes for any "regulation" in the states. Gov't does their job only when it brings revenue in the $$$$$$ territory. Everything else is civil and ignored - even if it's promoting the sale of millions of protected information.
Of all the reports I've submitted (evidence included) followups and fines have been issued to exactly 0 companies. Hell, Quadlock [phone mount company] happily acknowledged that their policy is to verify identity by requesting plain emails including photocopies of the credit card used for purchase and full state ID. Absolutely against regs.. who cares? Not the SCC nor the FTC.
While it’s not enforced perfectly, saying it’s not enforced not at all is just untrue.
Noyb alone has several hundred successful GDPR lawsuits: https://noyb.eu/en/project/cases
One of the recent rollouts that really grind my gears was Spotify rolling out LLM explanations of songs. Which is the most useful wasteful piece of sh*t ever. Why would I want to get a theory of what is 174bpm and other random crap.
It is insane, and I hate modernity and every single modern product that just shoves random LLM crap at you and pretend they are not AI-enabled.
Even the more open source apps are shoving ads for simple and obvious features, I went as far as to build my own entertainment system and it serves all my needs and I dont have to worry about the next time I click next I hear a FUCKING AD.
Spotify is a toxic shit company overall that is a general detriment to all musicians everywhere.
If you care about music just a little bit you should stop using it today and directly buy music from the artists you care about.
Bandcamp is great. Albums are usually ~$10 for high-fidelity digital downloads, and ~$25 gets you a vinyl record + the digital download.
Bandcamp is my preferred solution as well - apart from visiting concerts and buying merch etc directly from the artist, where possible.
Honestly, this is true for all streaming, not just Spotify. Stream if you want, but also buy albums from them if they offer it. Merch is even better.
Hell, even if you... acquire the music files unofficially and go buy a t-shirt or poster, the artist is still probably getting way more than they ever would have from you streaming all their albums on a loop.
It’s true but Spotify has consolidated the market in a way that I think no other provider has managed - maybe Tidal or YouTube Music. Some musicians that I know personally don’t like Spotify but they feel they have to be on there or be invisible.
One fascinating thing about LLMs is the degree of evangelism it inspires in some. You can explain some of that with paid micro influencers, people invested in the success of AI, consultants looking for workshop opportunities and all that, but I know enough people with no skin in the game at all, that turned into very vocal advocates.
I think to some degree, that effect is also at play here. CEOs, product managers etc are simply amazed, and want to spread the good news. I doubt they can even _comprehend_ that others might not be as excited as them.
One character I find interesting is Ezra Klein from the New York Times who desperately wants to see something positive come out of markets and industry and has an enthusiasm for AI which is not shared by his audience. He struggles to understand that skepticism and I think that's bad for his project.
At least he's not one of the many mooks who are doing ChatGPT-assisted (Grok-assisted?) blogging and boasting about it, even when it goes wrong, like Casey Handmer.
The entire purpose of people like Ezra Klein, Derek Thomas, and the elite journalist + consultant establishment is to simply preserve the neoliberal order and make sure any questions regarding it are confined in a box they defined where the outcomes never address material needs of the people.
I think comparing Klein and Thompson is like comparing Chess and Tic-Tac-Toe. At the very least Klein patiently reminds Jewish people that they really can be the baddies if they choose to be.
Lol. Disregarding risk of bringing Chess to TTT's level, it's bc Klein seems to have a broader actually inclusive self-identity. so usually, when he reminds, he is also reminding himself..
You also have to consider a ( I would argue large ) percentage of those evangelists are simply lying for financial gain. They see profit, or at least reduced costs, and quite simply don't give a shit about customer experience or anything like that.
Or this is finally their chance to be the smart guy who was in on the ground floor.
I think there’s a lot of that dream — note how many of them became AI experts after striking out in cryptocurrency — but also a huge undercurrent of desperation. The rich guys who run most of the economy have made it clear that they want mass layoffs and that LLMs are the tool they’ll use to get there, so these guys are hoping that if they get on board early enough they’ll be the people doing it to everyone else rather than the targets. I’m not sure how successful that’ll be but it’s somewhat understandable how people might find themselves thinking that’s the best option available in the current economy.
And this is the first technology that directly strokes their ego
I'm sure there is an effect when people talk on socials (linkedin, company intra etc) that they are marketing themselves. This is why I won't take any claims on socials that seriously.
I'll believe it when I see it.
I can't decide how much I like it myself. It can help me with really complicated projects. Software and otherwise. It has completely replaced my usage of non site local search engines. But I don't like how lazy it makes me. I don't vibe code, I understand what it is doing, and have it make adjustments typing it examples of what I want. But I can see myself getting lazier quckly. And when I find a task too hard for it I waste a lot of time trying to get my prompts correct before taking over.
>The AI product rollouts in the last two years have been some of the most aggressive and user hostile product rollouts in my entire life.
>I’ve had the worst customer experiences of my life in the last few months.
I attribute that to the massive amount of tax breaks and money that has been funneled to them by various governments. The government is the customer that they are appeasing right now. As soon as the spigot is turned off, they will be more inclined to appease us.
I do not know the consumer or b2b AI market well right now. I do know that billions of dollars are at stake from government sources. A smart company would focus on that.
I'm not aware of any government handouts for tech companies adding AI to their products, can you give an example, please?
The AI Workforce Training Act is closer to what OP was mentioning; the last paragraph of this article suggests more. https://fedscoop.com/ai-workforce-tax-credit-house-bill/
https://openai.com/it-IT/index/our-agreement-with-the-depart...
The Department of War is a customer, there's no handout here.
The government does procure services from private firms, this isn't new or special.
Except it's buying a product that doesn't even exist yet…
Uhh, the entire contract is a form of corporate welfare. So yes, the DoW giving money to these companies is a handout.
Just because it benefits them doesn't mean it's not a handout, especially when said money could be used elsewhere for purposes that actually benefit everyone and not a dozen people living in SF.
No, welfare is when you're given money for value you're not providing. It's a net drain on the system.
This is a government entity procuring a product they need from a private entity.
You can dislike it, but it's not a handout. Words have meaning.
I'm someone who makes extensive used of LLMs and agents for daily research, and I 100% of the time ignore the AI summary that google gives at the top of the page. If I am performing a web search, I've already decided that I'm explicitly NOT looking for an LLM summary.
I think Google's "AI Mode" does better at integrating search results and answering questions. It can find articles and scientific papers that match my memory in most situations and does a lot better at Arknights question answering than Microsoft Copilot (reskinned ChatGPT) does.
> posthogs opt-out training,
It should seriously be 100% illegal to force someone's content into AI training without their explicit consent, and no not opting out should not be an escape hatch.
Search is not the golden goose. Ads are. If search was the golden goose, they wouldn't be trying so hard to replace it with AI.
Just because Google used to do search as their main point of business does not mean that holds true today. Holding on to the false premise will only add to your confusion about their decisions.
Ads in Search make up a significant percentage of their revenue. It is also the gateway that gets people into the Google ecosystem.
Ads make the money, but Search is still the consumer facing product that brings people to Google and keeps them there. It’s so ubiquitous people don’t even think about it or notice it anymore.
I’m always surprised by how much people are still searching for stuff as we’ve moved from the open web to various platforms (Amazon, TikTok, Facebook, etc), but every time I see Google’s revenue breakdown I’m shocked by just how important Search still is to their business.
This is from 2024, but shows Search accounting for nearly 57% of revenue. Yes, this is made possible by the AdWords business, but without Search, that 57% goes away, unless that traffic goes to a 3rd party that is also using AdWords and Google were to make the same from 3rd party ads as 1st party. I find that doubtful.
https://www.doofinder.com/en/statistics/google-revenue-break...
I've found it hilarious that every single search engine does the same thing. You can do it even in Apple's App Store too. (Not seeing the scam I'm talking about? Search a few more times, it'll hit) How does anyone see this as anything but a scam? User clicks the ad? Get paid. User clicks the search result? No pay. Either way, the user gets the same experience. But why the fuck should any company pay for an ad when the user explicitly searched for their product? It's metric hacking. I mean what's their next move? Down rank the explicit result? When making more money requires degrading the product you know we've fucked up
>But why the fuck should any company pay for an ad when the user explicitly searched for their product?
If you don't buy out the top-place for the query, someone else will. In a better case a competitor - imagine Facebook Marketplace being the top result for "ebay". In the worst - a phishing site. The latter happens quite often for software searches.
Right, but that's because Google permits that. OP is saying Google should simply stop permitting advertising over the real answer.
Why would Google give themselves less money?
There's a lot of reasons, but it's probably how Google makes most of their money - brand names end up being high value ad targets - at least 6+ years ago when I worked in that sphere of things (ecommerce, primarily). It's legit extortion.
I guess that's why - because extortion is immoral. Eventually, those paying the protection fees will eventually find someone better to pay or will stop paying when the protection doesn't show up.
Let me repeat myself
That just sounds like business to me. You do whatever makes money.
This is called enshittification. Business behaves like with with the lack of regulations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41277484
It should be illegal to mislead the users like this. The search terms weren't generic and didn't match anything.
Not sure this is better, but if they don’t pay, most of the first page will instead point to random unrelated competitors and the search result will become visually harder to find. It is basically legalized mafia tactics (“you’ve got a nice business, shame if something were to happen to it if you don’t pay up”) since supposedly you could pay someone else to SEO the site and achieve the same result without just buying ads
You're exactly right that this is mafia tactics. Clearly people are buying into it to
It would be a shame if someone else got the top result
It’s basically a guaranteed way to get your term into the first rank. When people run a simple keyword search without intending to visit the site itself, for example when eBay is caught in a scandal and you’re curious, you type “eBay” expecting a news link somewhere on the first page. That and mafia-esque protection money basically
A lot of big tech behaviour, is very much like mafia behaviour. I always use that description, when people asks me what cloudflare does or how the spam network works. They sell both the problem and the solution and the most unfilterable spam always comes from those aggressively filtering legitimate stuff out (Gmail, Outlook).
Well because you are not paying for ads.
You are paying rent. Alphabet and Meta own all the real estate of the web, and you have to pay them rent to survive.
This is not done by the search engine - eBay purposely bids to be the top ad for the search term “eBay”. It’s called cannibalization. They’re more willing to pay for the impression and potential click through than they are willing to give up the ad space to a competitor.
See my comment sidethread. It's nice when the facts you assert to support your position are, you know, true.
eBay was an example from the parent, insert whatever brand you want. It’s still called cannibalization and it’s something companies have stopped doing because they don’t see great results
> And let's not forget, these are the same people that when searching for "eBay" will put an ad at the top of the results, linking to eBay, and then place eBay as the top search result.
Do you see an ad when you search for ebay? I don't.
eBay stopped paying for placement on the term "ebay" more than a decade ago, and I believe the executive who made that call got a bonus. It's possible of course that they changed their mind later, but since there still isn't an ad on the term today, I suspect they didn't.
(Methodology: I opened Microsoft Edge, where I have no addons or adblocking or anything installed, went to google.com, and searched for "ebay". There are no ads in the results panel. There is a sidebar with some non-sponsored information provided; below that sidebar is a section saying "people also search for" that mentions Etsy, Shopify, Poshmark, and Mercari. That section isn't sponsored either.
As a point of comparison, I also searched for "mortgage loans". (Same window, new tab, google.com.) On that search, there is no informational sidebar, and the results panel begins with a section called "Sponsored Results" which occupies the entire vertical extent of the browser window. (And consists of all of four links, with blurbs.) Below the sponsored results is the AI overview, and below that are the genuine results.)
I don't on that exact search but I do see it when I try this in the iPhone App Store. I do also see it on my Android when searching the Playstore.
It was an example. You're getting lost in the weeds. Similar to this saying BuT sOmEoNe ElSe WiLl GeT tHe ToP sPoT
> It’s so ubiquitous people don’t even think about it or notice it anymore.
Which is kind of the scary hazard for Google. They made people notice search by their announcements. They drew attention to the thing people took for granted as just how things work. People suddenly have a reason to look critically at it. Google has to hope to god the attention they receive back is actually positive.
> ads in search
Right, but you know what's even more effective than ads in search? Biased (towards paying customers) information in LLM output.
The main reason Google loved search was because it was the primary way they got your personal info. Now Chrome gives Googles your entire browsing history, Gmail lets them read your email, youtube tells them what you're interested in, android gives google your entire life offline and suddenly the only thing google search is good for is as just one more website pushing google ads.
AI is going to be great at pushing ads. Plus AI trains you to give google even more control. Instead of just presenting you with a list of websites offering different perspectives and opinions on something, Google can just tell you what they want you to know/think (or not tell you anything they'd rather you not know/think about). The more you get used to treating google like an oracle instead of a librarian the easier it will be to manipulate you.
They only dominate Ads because they dominate search if everyone leaves Search the ad business grinds to a halt as well. These are the ying and yang of Google.
Kind of. They dominate ads because the dominated search when they bought the successful ads company. By that point in time, they already had your profile built, and the further use of search just continues to enhance that profile. But now that ads has its own persistent tracking that dependence on search is not as strong as it used to be
People have reported a decrease in ROI from spending on Google ads already when they no longer control all the eyes and where you rank in what those eyes see when they search, that ROI will drop even more. People will stop paying for Google ads when the ROI is higher on other platforms.
Couple that with the fact that a lot of folks have moved their search to GPT or Claude once those platforms start taking in ad money... that budget will come from somewhere and that's likely existing Google ad buy dollars shifting.
> when they bought the successful ads company
Could you elaborate on this? What ad company did Google buy?
DoubleClick (2008, according to Wikipedia)
doubleclick.net, about 20 years ago.
May be search is not the golden goose, perhaps more the carrot that brings the user into range of the shitty stick of ads and data leeching.
I'm a bit afraid that although AI is being presented as part of the carrot, it may actually be a shittier stick.
This. Google wants to sell advertising. If they can embed advertising into AI and make more money, they will.
You ask AI for a product recommendation. It says "Buy X from Acme". Is that paid product placement? Who knows?
There's a no ads in the Ai result though. And even if they add there isn't space for like 4 or 5 ad results like some searches can return. Some Google searches I have to scroll a whole screen away before I see a real result.
This is just wrong. They are working AI into search so that AI does not cannablize search. Search goes hand-in-hand with ads.
> My friends who previously had no interest in technology and never talked about it, are suddenly following tech news closely all because they hate AI being pushed so hard.
My friends who previously had no interest in technology and never talked about it, are suddenly following tech news closely all because they have fear of missing out on AI :(
> My friends who previously had no interest in technology and never talked about it, are suddenly following tech news closely all because they have fear of missing out on AI :(
One of my friend ended up spending too much time on Candy AI or some sort of AI companion thingy :/
> because they have fear of missing out on AI
That's been my experience too, both with friends and coworkers.
It would seem that the negative sentiment around AI is largely an internet phenomenon. I've yet to run into a hardcore "AI skeptic" irl. People seem either neutral, or enthusiastic about it.
I've yet to meet anyone outside that likes AI except for manager or when people are pretending for their bosses at work. It became a survival tactic.
I know developers that like it. Not in a hyped way like bosses do, but they do like it.
(I don't know anybody that is actually more productive because of it, but I know people that consistently use it successfully in small tasks.)
I also know people afraid it will make all code worse and their jobs a nightmare. It's harder to find those people because they don't say it out loud, but there are plenty who think this way.
I am way more productive at developing stuff with AI.
I know it's only anecdata, but it's one data point.
I'm a tech startup co-founder able to avoid all the bullshit around it and just build stuff. My favourite part is that I can go through the planning part, get a decent plan for the build together, and then go do something else while the LLM builds it. It also really helps with maker/manager time because the LLM is keeping the context, not me, so if I'm interrupted I don't lose track of everything and have to reload context.
My brother with no programming experience took some AI courses and automated adding products to his ecommerce site from his suppliers. Fetches images, converts them, categorizes, adds descriptions/specs in multiple languages translated via DeepL API, calculates prices.
He also tries to troubleshoot/debug stuff without calling me... and just asking me to choose right path offered by AI. I love it :) Because I usually make people wait and don't have much time outside my business hours to do additional tech stuff.
And the customer of his site gets a bunch of AI generated rubbish
Could be correct, could be not, who cares?
Nop - that is a niche site, every product is stocked locally and it is to immensely reduce time required to insert new products. And it is not to generate new information, but to add existing info (apart from translation but most languages are known to check).
Every single software engineer I know uses it pretty heavily.
Becasue they like it? Or becasue it happens to better then alternative tools we had?
The truth is always in between the extremes.
I use AI a lot. But I’m specifically looking for ways it actually ads value.
Most people I meet in everyday life think AI is incredibly useful and use it all the time. I have run into a few people in real life who vehemently oppose it, and many more online, but out in the world, they appear to be a minority.
I've had conversations in recent months with several friends who are non-tech, "granola" type folks. They pretty universally expressed dislike for and concern about AI, but then when the conversation turned to whether they used it for anything, the all admitted that they do appreciate being able to use it for some tasks. I think it's complicated for a lot of people (myself included).
Meanwhile I've never run into anyone who actually likes AI in any form (except for my boss). Most people who dislike it aren't bringing it up at random. I'm sure it has to do with the circles you interact with and their demographics.
A recent NBC News poll gave "AI" a -20% net approval rating. If you're in the U.S., the people you run into IRL are kinda weird.
(I didn't quickly find polls for the rest of the world)
Perhaps they are, but I think what I think is odd is how many are simultaneously opposed to the effects of AI (data centers, environmental impact, job loss) yet also are daily, paying users of it even outside of work. I know several who are like that.
I wonder how many in that poll have a negative sentiment about AI, yet are also heavy users. There seems to be some kind of disconnect going on?
> I wonder how many in that poll have a negative sentiment about AI, yet are also heavy users. There seems to be some kind of disconnect going on?
Being a heavy user seems like it'd create a lot of resentment if you don't actually enjoy doing it.
If you have used a tool for years and years and suddenly it shoves in a bunch of AI, like Duolingo or Google, are you a heavy user who may well dislike the results?
I have to put in some work to not be a heavy user by any reasonable definition.
ChatGPT has been downloaded >1 billion times on the Android PlayStore. AI is incredibly popular.
People have all sorts of concerns about how AI will change society, but that's precisely because it's so useful for so many things. If it were useless or just a fad, there would be no reason to worry.
My point was that using something heavily means you have an informed opinion about hating it. Hating something you have never tried is way weirder.
The startup where I worked had 1 million downloads (which is much less), but how many of those were using it daily vs trying it for 30 minutes and forgetting about it?
Less than 10% in our case :)
1 billion downloads, even if only 10% of those are active users, is a massive number.
Heck, I haven't even downloaded the ChatGPT app, but I use their website all the time.
AI use has taken off, and a large fraction of the population is using it regularly, if their own accord.
Yep, the free tier. Will they pay for it or stick around once it becomes more ads than anything else?
Seems the main claims against it center around:
1. Labor replacement
2. AI is actually bad in-and-of-itself. Doesn't work, not useulf etc.
3. Energy concerns
Odd not to see my main concern, which is gathering large amounts of human knowledge in a machine that is ultimately tweaked by the "selected" few not just for profiting off of it, but to also (ultimately) have a big influence on what is appropriate and what isn't.
I have no issues with the technology itself.
The thing is, I hear those concerns a lot too, from people that are daily heavy users of AI.
I wonder how many still say they have a negative sentiment on AI yet are still paying customers.
I've also seen water usage concerns.
Talk to career artists in real life (like animators); a majority of them have already lost their jobs due to AI layoffs.
This goes for most tech topics. Not long ago tech sites had users who were aware that their preferences as a tech person were different than the average person.
Then it became so common to be a techy person and surround yourself with other techy people that it was easy to fall into a bubble and not realize it. When all of your news websites, coworkers, social media feeds, and friends in the group chat all think the same thing it feels like everyone in the world agrees with you.
You see it whenever social media topics come up. On Hacker News there’s never ending confusion about how Facebook continues to exist because the common refrain is “nobody uses Facebook any more”. Leave the tech bubble, though, and Facebook has a massive number of active users and activity. Whenever I mention this it gets doubted, denied, or even dismissed as lies from Meta trying to inflate their stock price. The dismissals always come from people who proudly deleted their Facebook account ten years ago and therefore have no idea what happens on Facebook, of course.
One of my favorite comment sections this year was when a lot of people were recounting how their aunt or cousin or grandma used Facebook and actually enjoyed it, which attracted comments saying they must be a rare outlier. It just goes too much against the bubble consensus that everyone hates Facebook and has a bad time when they use it.
> Then it became so common to be a techy person and surround yourself with other techy people that it was easy to fall into a bubble and not realize it. When all of your news websites, coworkers, social media feeds, and friends in the group chat all think the same thing it feels like everyone in the world agrees with you.
FWIW I think it's a combo of people who spend all their time in online circles and and the effect on upvote sites where people try to appeal to the group sentiment to farm for votes. There's a lot of tech communities that consist of people who pretty much don't socialize in person and it was greatly exacerbated by the pandemic.
As a hardcore AI skeptic, no one has run into me IRL either, because I pretend at work to be neutral, except to the one other skeptic who also pretends to be neutral.
I'm in my 50s and all my friends and family hate AI. My parents in their 70s can't really comprehend it. They got used to search and want nothing to do with AI. Some company is trying to build an AI data center where they live, and they're livid about it.
Personally, I like it sometimes, but I'm a techie and understand the limitations, and I dislike not being given options to use or not use it.
I know plenty in real life. Way way way more than online.
Been using Google since they exists. I stopped without any issue and even thinking too much about it 2 years ago.
This include work.
I use DDG, kagy and the LLM du jour .
Again, no friction. No plan. No transition période. I just changed the default search engine on a whim.
> The AI product rollouts in the last two years have been some of the most aggressive and user hostile product rollouts in my entire life.
I’m getting extremely annoyed by the Base44 ads I see on YouTube every other video.
First I pressed skip all the time, but the ads keep popping up. So now, every time I see it, I click on the ad and then immediately close the site. At least I can make their aggressive ad strategy a bit more expensive.
Youtube revanced on your phone + ublock on firefox and you'll never see youtube ads again. There's also a replacement app for android TV that I forgot the name of that works well. Do not use chrome, google nerfed its ad-blocking capabilities a while ago
I can't fathom why anyone would still willingly watch ads when there are so many ways to block them online.
Up until about 2019, I did not block ads. I felt that the ads a site or service chooses to run was a pretty good way to gauge whether I wanted to continue to use that site or service, and ads are what cover the operating costs.
Over 20 years I got to watch a HUGE change in the ecosystem of advertising, starting with static imaged baked right into the page and transparent pop-overs at the bottom of YouTube videos. If an operator used horrendous popups, un-muetable audio, or other adversarial tactics I would generally just not use them, the internet is a big place, I can shop around.
By 2019 it got to the point that nearly every operator was using ads so large and offensive that nearly every website was unusable. Even YouTube had moved to multiple, sequential, un-skippable, mid-roll ads that made the viewing experience worse than cable. I installed a browser extension and set up a pihole.
I do however feel like this leaves things broken. There are very obvious holes in pages that look like some developer spammed line breaks randomly throughout the page. If operators moved back to static images or animated banners I would honestly prefer it to the disjointed look you get with no ads at all.
Its probably why you keep seeing them a click is marked as interest and clicking away doesnt cost anything they refund it.
No, for a long time I never clicked. But since I keep seeing the freaking ads, I decided to click on them, because from what I understand they have to pay money for each ad click.
They don't if you click away in a second or two. Spending more time will cost them.
But your best strategy is to zoom past those ads quickly no pausing or close the browser when you see them
> downloading DuckDuckGo.
What for? Just use the website via your favourite browser.
That’s what I told him… just set Safari to use it in Settings, but it seemed like he had already done it and was now invested in using a whole new app just to switch search engines. This is a symptom of the app-based model people now think in.
And that mindset makes this move even more risky. If people move away from Chrome to DDG, Brave, or Kagi Orion browsers which block tracking by default, then that will harm their ad income even more.
> My friends who previously had no interest in technology
Their friend are probably the kind of people conflating Chrome/Google with "The Internet"
And I think on Android its even less clear the distinction between the browser app and "Google"
What for? Just tap the icon to open the app.
While there is a meaningful subset of the population that will do this, I wonder if the vast majority of people, even if they share the same negative sentiment towards AI and in particular how Google is pushing it in their products, will find the friction in changing up their workflows and routines to be too much to actually change things up.
While Google has certainly failed with their products before, by and large as a company they are "too big to fail" at this point so to speak where the myriad products they offer have become a very significant part of the digital infrastructure on which much of the world runs.
Anecdotally I've also switched to DuckDuckGo in the past because I didn't want Google looking over my shoulder on my browsing history (this was pre-AI), but I ended up coming back because I felt the search results weren't quite as good (or perhaps it was just in my head, and the differing UI was enough to throw me off).
And this may be a contrarian opinion, and while I hate the idea of Google mining all of my data and monetizing it, I actually find value in the AI 'previews' that Google provides (and will often ask it follow up questions as a means of getting 'free' LLM responses back for 'easier' prompts that I don't want to burn Claude tokens on).
> weren't quite as good
A lot of people keep saying this, and yet I never saw a reasonable example. Whenever DDG fails for me, the Google's results are even worse.
> If Google isn’t carefully they’re going to push people away from their golden goose.
Too late, people have started moving. They have to act fast to stop the migration from growing.
I'm curious — how do non-techies know? During stand-up the other day I was making small talk like "hey did you guys know that Google search is dead" and everyone was like "it is?" and I had to link to the Google IO to prove it because indeed, doing a Google search worked the same way it always had.
So I'm wondering how other folks are finding this out.
> If Google isn’t carefully they’re going to push people away from their golden goose.
we have moments like this every few years (almost as frequent as crypto waves in recent memory), but they keep chugging along.
couple years back it was all about saying the GPTs have replaced search for people and how google is dead. now when they implement the same, it drives people away.
i can imagine how it can be difficult to be in their shoes, when any change is met with negativity. no surprise that the core interface has...had not changed all this time.
context: left to ddg almost a decade ago in a similar exodus wave.
All that being said the product is genuinely worse now.
The other day I googled "I'll be resolving" in quotation marks as I usually do when I'm unsure if it's idiomatic (or grammatically correct for that matter) English.
AI mode replied with: "I'm on it. Tell me what you're working on, and I'll jump right in with the exact steps, scripts, or details you need to tackle it! What exactly are you looking to resolve?"
Just give me the damn phrase used in a sentence along with the number of results so that I can assess how common this expression is.
I think this is very true. They probably got scared of the almost 1b weekly active users of ChatGPT, and how people would rather ask ChatGPT than use Google. It will be a balance but this is a great opportunity for smaller search engines to make a real comeback.
For what it’s worth, you don’t need to even download DDG. I just set it as my homepage on my iOS safari.
It can be set as the default search engine in Safari, one of the few options Apple gives for search engines. No need to change your home page. I told my friend this as well, but I think that idea was slightly beyond his current mental model of how things work on the phone.
I’ve tried using the homepage method before with Kagi, as the extension to set it as the default search is a pretty ugly hack. I found it created too much friction, as I’m often searching from an existing page.
Kagi phone app is pretty nice. I do all my searching in Kagi, the clicked results launch my default browser and the search results stay stable where they are.
Customize Search Engine (https://cizzuk.net/projects/cse/) allows you to make whatever search engine actually work in the address bar.
You have to set it to lite.duckduckgo.com (or noai.duckduckgo.com) or you still get AI crap from DDG too.
Downloading a search engine website?
DuckDuckGo makes a webkit wrapper with their branding. It does actually have some good features built in, but I don't recommend it over Brave or Mullvad Browser.
DDG has the same AI overview at the top of their search results that Google does. What's the goal of switching?
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
the default is still the AI'ed version though...
Google has been ever-worsening trash for years.
Their "AI" bullshit did in fact push me to finally make DuckDuckGo my default page. Happy to hear others are switching too.
> AI being pushed so hard.
What I see is people using AI of their own free will, because it's incredibly useful.
It's true that inside tech companies, AI is being pushed into products, but outside of those companies, normal people are rapidly adopting AI for all sorts of daily uses.
"I don't know what this symbol on my dishwasher means." -> Ask AI.
"Why is my bread not rising properly?" -> Ask AI.
These are the types of things that previously would have taken a lot longer to figure out, but that you can get an immediate answer to with AI. That's the fundamental reason why it's taking off. Not because it's being pushed.
You can talk all you want about generalization and reasoning ability and AGI, but the fact is that it's also useful simply as a really user friendly database.
Even if it's only able to report facts from its dataset or perform simple synthesis of search results.
That it can actually reason to a certain extent is bonus points.
> If Google isn’t carefully they’re going to push people away from their golden goose.
Won’t be surprised if Google thinks their Golden Goose is terminally ill and AI is the replacement.
Google is really an information provider powered by ads. That’s what people use their search for - to get information.
Google’s search basically has the internet as its backend - information-wise. I think it’s inevitable that AI slop (output from low quality GenAI) will render it useless eventually.
So Google’s solution is to build their own AI with information curated by them to try to stay the front page of the internet.
I actually like AI mode in Google. My main reason is if I just have a quick question it seems a lot quicker than logging into ChatGPT/Claude as I can just type it in the address bar.
Of course DDG / others can do the exact same thing as they already have an AI mode. Maybe you can even set up ChatGPT as a search engine - not sure. The key for this use case is speed - it has to be nearly instant.
Kagi does this really nicely, you just add a question mark at the end and it'll add on top of the search results an LLM summary of what's been found. It's subpar in quality but more than enough to aggregate the results by theme
Yeah you'd need to support it in the term itself. So many queries coming from the url bar. As opposed to a toggle or something. I wonder if we have info on that - what percentage is input in address bar vs google homepage/app.
The problem is that's not discoverable though. The toggle on google.com would be nice but most people probably arent searching that way.
>I actually like AI mode in Google. My main reason is if I just have a quick question it seems a lot quicker than logging into ChatGPT/Claude as I can just type it in the address bar.
This is the exact use-case, and it makes a lot of sense. The hard part for Google is identifying when someone wants search and when someone wants an AI response. It's somewhat identifiable by the input but of course thats extremely messy to determine systematically.
Just do what Kagi does and turn on AI mode only if there's a "?" At the end of the query.
They are already doing something like that though. It's not just a ? mark, but they are getting some signal from the input and classifying it as a search term or AI prompt. Not all inputs have an AI response.
And a "?" at the end is not going to capture a lot of real LLM prompts like "What should I pack for my vaction? Im going to Florida in September."
I mean you could do something like this. But it's really not much different than other manual search codes that are used by more power users like like "", "site:" etc.
They probably have a term for it but their AI response is just another "embedded result" for lack of a better term. Like displaying the local weather directly at the top when you search "weather", etc.
It was funny how the other way when I searched for "nvm" to look up Node Version Manager, the AI mode thought I was saying "nevermind" to it. It felt quite jarring.
The problem is that it’s both slow and treacherous. They can work on performance but the convenience is really undercut by it being wrong a significant amount of the time and incomplete even more frequently so I have to review the search results anyway.
People already talked about the Kagi Quick Answer feature with the question mark.
But if you still want ChatGPT/Claude, then you simply create a custom bang and associate it with something like `https://chatgpt.com/?q=%s`
So now in your address bar you type "how to center a div !gpt" and it will start a session with your query
If you use Firefox, then you can add chatgpt as a search engine with keyword gpt. Then you can type "gpt how to centre a div" into your address bar and get the same thing without routing it through Kagi, or needing Kagi.
Claude is https://claude.ai/new?q=%s
It takes me little more than a second to open a chat session with an AI. I spend way more time asking my question that pulling it up. All I have to do is type two characters in my address bar the browser knows which URL I want. That's like VI command speed. Two letters... <Enter>... the website loads within a second, the chat text box is focused and I make my request.
I'm as anti-Google as anyone out there. I block all their ads, refuse to pay for youtube, go out of my way to avoid their hardware, etc. But I have to admit AI mode is great. It's fast, free, not yet cluttered with ads, and useful. I treat it as a search engine that does a fuzzy search rather than the more literal text match search that we're used to.
I recently bought a Bambu 3d printer after Reddit/HN drew my attention to them and AI mode has been really useful for me to learn about my new printer and troubleshoot things. There is so much information and I don't have time to read everything. I just want to ask a targeted question and have something summarize the literature's answers for it.
It will be a sad day when Google inevitably enshittifies it, but for now I'm happy for them to subsidize my expensive LLM queries.
> It's fast, free, not yet cluttered with ads
That was essentially how people praised Google in their early days. It certainly has ads now.
Not only does it have ads, they intentionally vandalized their engine so you'd give them more clicks.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
I'm the same way, I hate using Google search for searching because it's basically useless, and their other ecosystem offerings generally get enshittified over time so it's not worth paying for or relying on.
But if they're letting me using AI for free without logging in and I just need a dumb AI slop answer, then I'm more than happy to burn their tokens instead of my own. Any serious work goes to a different LLM provider. The switching cost for moving to a different LLM provider in the future is practically zero.
Google search feels so limited compared to Kagi. I discover so many more alternative resources when searching with Kagi.
"Surely the last time after handing out carrots long enough to kill all competition, they switched from carrots to sticks, that sucks; but look? now they started giving out carrots again!! It will be such a sad day when no more carrots"
“Someone’s handing out free carrots but it may be sticks someday so I’m gonna be mad about it today and grow my own carrots. That’ll show ‘em! My neighbor’s roasted carrots sure do smell good though.”
"I took their free carrots and now several years later, their carrots are a global ~monoculture that have been modified to grow faster but taste much worse. I don't like their carrots anymore but most other carrots are grown by small-scale local farms and can't be bought for cheap because the farmers never managed to get competitive economies of scale."
"I wish I'd supported the crazy folks who did carrot science in public and distributed seeds and allowed everyone to breed them so that we could all find better varieties for the common good! They still seem to be eating well."
(I see your very practical point, but I do think making the locally suboptimal choice in the hope of better long-term outcomes is a valid philosophical position.)
I also see the other side. I wish it wasn’t Google that currently has the best free product, because their well-oiled ad machine is going to inevitably turn the crank to find that sweet spot where the product is barely tolerable due to ads. But if I want free, fast, mostly correct lookups to plain English questions, what’s my alternative? Paying OpenAI or anthropic doesn’t seem to really change much. They’re going to do ads too. Abstain from AI entirely and continue to use non-AI Google search and take 10x as long to learn? Google still wins and I lose.
By which measure is the Google's free AI better than the one at DuckDuckGo? Happy user of the latter.
Me too. To be honest, I am not that interested in reading the first 5-10 search results to find what I am looking for. If Google can do that for me and summarize the main points, that's another 10 minutes of my life saved.
You could get the same result from registering ChatGPT as a search provider in your browser.
If you could use something like a ddg bang for it? like !chat at the end of the search and it goes to some router?
In DDG's case, searching with !ai sends it to duck.ai
try this:
If it didn't just make stuff up it would be even better!
> Just for a start, visits to its AI-free search page noai.duckduckgo.com between May 20 to May 25 are said to have increased by 22.7% on average week-on-week, with the figures peaking May 24 at 27.7%.
> The DuckDuckGo mobile app saw installs spike in the US by 18.1% on average compared to the previous week. TechCrunch reported this growth was sustained over six days, peaking at 30.5% on May 25. An even greater number of iOS users hit download on the app though, with installs seeing an average week-on-week growth of 33% and a peak of 69.9%.
Why do they report only relative numbers? These numbers alone are meaningless. This is just lazy reporting.
They wanted to write a story where this was a negative consequence for Google, I suspect, but the absolute numbers wouldn’t have supported that (they mention that it is inconsequential to Google a couple paragraphs in, if your browser can sustain the site for that long. Mine had trouble).
0.2% of google users try out duck duck go after google pushes more AI doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
Because it's an ad for DuckDuckGo and PCGamer loves anti-AI engagement bait outrage articles because they bring clicks from outraged "gamers" and this brings them ad revenue, too so you are reading an ad for an ad.
They used to have public-facing relative figures located on /traffic, but it looks like they got rid of that page some years back and now it just redirects to the homepage.
Random snapshot of what it looked like: https://web.archive.org/web/20220101023001/https://duckduckg...
...because the absolute numbers are incredibly low. And I say this as a fan of DDG! It's just the reality we live in; those who are negatively polarized against AI enough to make this sort of change are just very small in number.
noai.duckduckgo.com probably receives much less traffic than the main domain, which enjoys placement in many prominent browsers (and offers AI overviews by default, although they are far smaller and less likely to appear than on Google). It would be much more interesting to see absolute numbers... in the context of the main site.
I love the way Kagi does AI - it defaults to a regular search, but if you add a question mark to the end, it will give you an AI answer. Additionally there is a small "quick answer" button at the top of all results that will give an AI answer if clicked.
Yeah, starting from a much lower baseline than DDG, I've had something like a 10x increase in queries last ~week. Seems like a lot of people are looking for alternatives.
For as much as how the startup space loves to pay lip service to contrarian bets, people sure do all be running in the same direction.
thanks for your work. Marginalia is important for the survival of the human internet
https://marginalia-search.com/
Just looked at it for the first time. My first impression - grey, gray and more grey. Please help brighten our day by adding some color to the page?
Seems cool. I'll definitely try using it. Do you have a shorter url? Its going to be an uphill battle telling people to check out" marginalia no not magnolia HYPHEN yeah hyphen not underscore or dash search DOT com"
Google has ~90% of search where DuckDuckGo has <1%.
A ~30% jump of DuckDuckGo is about 0.3% of global search traffic, basically a rounding error for google.
Still, it's an interesting signal, but not nearly enough to worry Google. If the jump had been 300% that would merit some thought.
0.3% is definitely not a ”rounding error”. For Google it would mean roughly $650M drop in revenue.
Two issues with this.
- Search ad pricing is inelastic and auction based (supply goes down price goes up).
- A jump in traffic to DuckDuckGo does not mean Google is experiencing a decline in search volume. Number of queries per session has increased since launching AI Overviews.
> Search ad pricing is inelastic and auction based (supply goes down price goes up).
False. Advertisers have budgets and ROI targets. If Google cannot compete people will get their clicks elsewhere.
> A jump in traffic to DuckDuckGo does not mean Google is experiencing a decline in search volume. Number of queries per session has increased since launching AI Overviews.
But it does produce lower ROI for advertisers (in this case: CTR goes down because my ad is being shown to more people). Once user is on my landing page, my conversion rate is fine month on month (±1%), but my CTR on google got sharply worse by 5% since, and if it goes much further I'll stop completely on Google.
I doubt I am alone: Maybe others will jump ship sooner and the price will recover (demand goes down) but in either event Google is less net revenue, and given how aggressive their sales pushes have been I think it could be that big
That's users changing products in advance of a change, which is a relatively uncommon thing. We'll presumably see another bump when Google actually rolls out their changes.
Well, it's users trying another product anyway.
I don't think you can even refer to google as search anymore when it spews bullshit rather than furnishing results
The ‘bullshit’ is often better than the results though.
I don’t have to click through a load of cookie banners and login popups to see it.
If you love AI mode, then won't you just use a chat app? That'll search Google for you, and it'll keep more context, use a better model, etc, etc.
When people open a search bar and type stuff, they're showing an incredibly strong intent to... search the web.
This reminds me of when MS tried to turn all Windows user interactions into bing, or (even worse) copilot. How did that work out for them?
Anyway, unlike windows, there's zero cost to switch away from Google's search product. I'm predicting a bigger backfire.
I've been using Kagi for years and am not looking back. Okay, it costs money; it could sometimes be worse than Google, but the only free cheese is in the mousetrap.
+1 for Kagi. Been a subscriber for almost 2 years and no intention of cancelling, it just works.
how is duckduckgo using us?
duck shoves AI results down my throat no matter how many times I say no. And they are getting more aggressive with their ads.
DDG does offer a non-ai "mode" at https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
The world seems to be fragmenting, into those that see the value in the latest from Google, and those that resist changes like this. I search for how much oil does my <ICE vehicle> take" and get the exact answer in a single sentence, or I suppose I could click the links and wade through all the validation for choosing <ICE vehicle> and how often one should change the oil, and which brand of oil that blog is pushing etc etc.
I love Google's AI answers and their AI Mode tab. DDG is just Bing or a search vendor proxy, so I've never understood the fascination. At least Perplexity is different to Google. DDG seeing a 28% increase is like Google saying they saw a drop of 0.0000000001% in traffic.
HN crowd forget that the world isn't like us, they didn't grow up with Yahoo and Alta Vista, with Excite etc etc. Our SOP is to resist all change, anytime Apple brings out a new version it'll be the end of Apple according to HN - Apple - the biggest company in the world - what do they know about UI, "Liquid Glass sucks!" :) :)
We're a community in danger of pushing out those new to the tech world, recent graduates will be made to feel unwelcome if we continue to trash everything that the biggest companies in the world do, like we always know better. I implore the community to be more positive about the future, about the technologies that will take us into that future.
> I search for how much oil does my <ICE vehicle> take" and get the exact answer in a single sentence, or I suppose I could click the links and wade through all the validation for choosing <ICE vehicle> and how often one should change the oil, and which brand of oil that blog is pushing etc etc.
Don't you have to do that _anyway_? Unless you're just blindly trusting the AI to be correct, and if that's the case, please do enjoy gluing your cheese to your pizza.
Yeah, but perhaps we're getting to the point where the AI synthesis of all reachable data sources is going to be more truthy than trusting whatever random anonymous result you pick from the top half of the results page.
I'm also finding that the AI-cited links are often more helpful and authoritative than the top search results.
I like having a direct answer to my question "how much oil does my engine take" but as of today I do not trust the answer to be correct, so I still cross check several sources, ideally ones that appear to be authoritative.
I asked claude to dig up the current Ford Bulletin for the engine in my truck to tell me the recommended motor oil. And it found the updated recommendations properly. I wouldn't trust google AI because I know specifically that the recommendations changed, and I don't want whatever the published specs were when the engine was first manufactured, which is out of date (and found on lots of low quality blogs). I don't even trust claude, but it gave me the URL to click on to verify and summarized it well enough that I mostly trusted that it wasn't using the cited technical bulletin and not a bunch of random AI-slop web pages.
I wouldn't trust any 'confident stochastic next-word predictor' to tell me fact. There are official sources of information for these kinds of car maintenance questions.
Better than asking your backyard mechanic buddy who believes that you don't need anything other than 10W40 or something like that. You have always had to know who to trust and what level of work you need to do in order to get to an answer which is satisfactory. And in this case, Claude cited the manufacturer's bulletin which is the actual best source of truth that you're talking about.
Right, but standard Google search doesn't find them reliably either. Instead you get answers from enthusiast forums, "quick oil change" franchise sites, SEO slop, and maybe somehing from the actual manufacturer site if you scroll down.
Being critical about AI companies isn't what's pushing new people away from the tech world. The AI companies and the consequences of their actions are, as well as comments like this pretending the issues don't exist and that we need to just be positive about the "future".
And supposing these technologies do take us into the future: when said future is bleak and worse in most ways than what came before, people aren't going to be encouraged or enthusiastic about the tech world.
> search for how much oil does my <ICE vehicle> take" and get the exact answer in a single sentence
How do you know the answer is exact?
> or I suppose I could click the links and wade through all the validation for choosing <ICE vehicle> and how often one should change the oil, and which brand of oil that blog is pushing etc etc.
Where do you think that "exact answer" is being scraped and averaged-out from?
Are you going to enjoy a future where those different sources can't be found, so now Google requires you to have a subscription that includes data about vehicle repair? The great thing about the web before was that the information was available for everyone, it was decentralized. This is what they are trying to kill.
> The world seems to be fragmenting, into those that see the value in the latest from Google, and those that resist changes like this.
This reads as a strongly closed minded claim that has been "whitewashed into corporate appropriate speech" by an llm. If you cannot understand any validity to the other side of a debate then you are not engaging in discussion, no matter how your claims are dressed up.
I've never seen such a reaction to Apple on HN. Quite to the contrary, there are a lot of fanboys here. A lot of macOS-only software is promoted here and I rarely see any complaints in the comments.
You're entitled to your opinion. But "we should embrace the stuff big tech is doing" does not follow from "let's be welcoming to new entrants to the field". They are, of course, welcome to their opinions as well. But even if they and I disagree on things, that doesn't make them unwelcome. So no, I'm not going to embrace the slop Google is putting out based on a spurious concern over welcoming newcomers.
Google's Search and its AI result can alternatively help or hinder me, I find.
If I'm looking for a relatively straightforward and simple piece of information quickly (e.g. "wooden arch mirror stores linden") then the AI summary can be useful, because I don't need more than surface level info.
If I intend to analyze and understand something (e.g. "developer API issues Zoho Thrive"), then the AI summary and the general degradation in the quality of search results from Google really hinder me. I have to work to avoid a lazy and low value answer, whereas what I really want to do is go through various actual websites and reflect on them to gain insight.
I feel like the second scenario was never good with Google. You had to go through several search results describing other problems, and there was a high chance you still didn't find anything relating to yours; and then, it wasn't guaranteed that a years-old problem got fixed.
If I have an issue with my Mac, seeing an Apple Discussions result at the top readies me for disappointment.
Meanwhile, I've found a normal chat with current ChatGPT to be very helpful, as long as it isn't about itself or other OpenAI products.
My usecase would be investigating a potential integration - I want to go and see everyone's comments on the websites themselves. I'm not looking for an answer - I don't know the question - I'm looking for understanding.
I find it to be a fundamental hinderance as they use a cheap model. The cheap model gets confused based on conflicting reddit threads and then I get a wrong answer.
It's better to just ask codex to do the search for me, but this is much slower - but increasingly my go to. I wish there was a fast search api codex could hook into to answer internet questions faster.
I switched to DDG about a year ago and it works fine for me. For some queries, Google still surfaces better results, but DDG is good enough that I don't really miss it.
The only Google service I haven't been able to replace is YouTube - no real alternative. I still use Google Maps as well, but could probably switch to Apple maps without missing much. For hiking trails, Apple Maps has often been superior. I briefly tried OpenStreetMaps years ago, but the lack of traffic data and the fact that it gave me bad directions made it untenable.
For hiking trails, I highly recommend https://www.comaps.app/. It's simply miles ahead of Google Maps and Apple Maps for hike and biking.
Thanks, will have to check that out! Also use Strava, so maybe I should just refer to the heatmaps
Very similar experience. As an example I had to user Naver and Kakao maps in Korea instead of Google and those apps gave me sort of another perspective that other apps can be better than G for sure. For youtube I have been fighting the addiction and eventually disabled all options around privacy and eventually reduced the use quite a bit as they do not render the feed of random videos and shorts anymore (just subs).
This is my experience as well.
I genuinely find DDG more effective than Google Search. I have used it as a daily driver for 2+ years now. When i cannot find anything with DDG, i try with the !g macro, but results are more often than not even worse.
It certainly struggles a lot more with non-English queries. Been using it since 2019
I switched away from Google to Duck a few years back. But I observed that I mostly do !g and end up on Google. I read similar comments from many others on other threads.
Recently I switched to Kagi and has been a very happy customer. I never visited Google after that. Only downside is the Search on mobile. You have to install an app and enable it as extension on safari. Logging in never worked and couldn't enable my premium Kagi on iPhone.
> Only downside is the Search on mobile. You have to install an app and enable it as extension on safari. Logging in never worked and couldn't enable my premium Kagi on iPhone.
I just have Kagi set a custom search engine in mobile browser - no seperate app needed.
https://kagi.com/search?q=%s
Unfortunately the only way to do it on IOS Safari is as the user above described, you have to install and configure an extension, there are no 'custom' search engines natively. Other IOS browsers are fine, i.e. Chrome, Vivaldi, Orion, etc.
You're right, I use Brave on iOS but Safari doesn't let you choose beyond a defined list.
Google is better than Duck's backend (Bing or Yahoo, IIRC)
However, I find that most of my queries don't require Google to find the result. Maybe once every couple days I do a search, don't like the results, and then add a "!g". Most of the time it's fine and I get to avoid Google's ecosystem.
Yeah, same. Switched my default to Duck about a year back although I've still got Google on mobile (something I only just clocked as I type).
Google search had degraded so badly pre-AI, I was already finding it equivalent for most things. The odd few searches benefit from Google, but nowhere near enough to warrant them as a default.
I truly don't get Google's move.
I'm sure the model is fine, but it's not Google Search, and when I want Search I want Search. If I wanted to ask an AI, why can't I ask the one from my subscription... that I'm already paying for... that's actually good... that can also search the web?
I assume it's a play to test the waters for how the ad market is going to work, because as a product I really can't see why I would ever use it. Dropbox comment moment incoming?
They want to capture more of the value that was previously going to others. That's basically what this has all been leading to. Why let a cooking website get visitors and ad revenue when they are free to take the content and show it as their own? Now they are going to do the same to e-commerce. Either they are going to let customers buy their products through Google's interface, or they won't be discovered. No more ownership of the customer relationship. Stores will be a backend warehouse and manufacturer now with Google taking a percentage of all profits.
> Why let a cooking website get visitors and ad revenue when they are free to take the content and show it as their own?
I think this is a step beyond that - why should people be creating cooking websites when you can ask LLM how to cook given thing, while indeed, serving their own ads. It's the continuation of "we own content other people produce" policy
recall the pizza sauce glue trick, to stop cheese from sliding off.
there are other such goodies like mashed potatoes with broken lightbulb gravy, or fiberglass omelette, enjoyed by beldar conehead.
i wouldnt trust an AI for any recipe that i dont have personal experience with.
the safety rails are not very strong yet.
If you are half decent at cooking it is actually pretty helpful to explore cooking something new. Just like coding it is nice to get specific answers to your specific question and it is pretty easy to reason about the quality using your own experience.
I would be interested in an example of this. LLMs will often combine recipes from random sites. If you're experienced enough at cooking to reason about the quality _for something new to you_, what value is there in an LLM here? I don't see any similarities to coding here.
To me the similarity is I know exactly what I want to do but cannot really remember syntax (coding) or key variables (cooking) like temp and time. But I have enough experience to know if the output makes sense. Either one I can ask an llm a specific question and get a somewhat reliable specific answer that I feel comfortable parsing… this is actually one of the reasons I think I am eventually going to be on the local inference bandwagon. It is not far from being good enough for my use cases. And I will be able to skip the inevitable enshittification.
In terms of temp and time surely if you know enough to judge it's correctness, you would not need it in the first place? Code correctness is rather objective and easily testable. Cooking is rather subjective and only testable with great effort and time. I just checked 4 models on a 4lb pork shoulder in an oven. Flash was super off, suggesting you could pull at 145-150F for a sliced roast. Yeah, you could and it would fucking suck. The per lb time and total time also didn't add up. The others were better but varied. Only one (opus) thought to ask if it was bone-in. If you're very specific you could certainly have it aggregate a bunch of recipes to get a sense of what's close to a good answer, but ultimately it depends on what sources it chooses.
I could see LLMs being helpful to explore what's out there, like finding similar dishes or dishes involving a specific set of ingredients or dishes involving a particular technique, but a pretty poor tool for the actual technicalities of cooking or more importantly the uniquely personal aspects of food culture.
I dunno. I'd just buy larousse and on food and cooking.
I recently roasted a 5lb leg of lamb. Temp was pretty obvious but I had never cooked meat this way so an idea on time is really useful. Google search is a disaster for this kind of question. And I guess I have never encountered a good general cook book that I feel comfortable building off of.
I think all the science of cooking ones are a good bet for generalist knowledge. Some of the more textbook like ones as well. The food lab and on food and cooking stand out, but there are many others. I'm not sure I'd classify them as cookbooks.
Food lab, for example, covers buying storing and cooking lamb + a guide for a 5-7lb boneless leg across 5 or so pages. Kenji goes through great lengths to build intuition. I'm sure larousse, which is more of an encyclopedia, covers lamb quite extensively but it's probably more terse.
The internet can be an excellent source, but like most things it depends on who is writing it down.
I agree and this response was following OPs example. But the point still stands - the goal is to outsource, in a weird way, the results being served = Google as such wouldn't need to pay for content. Now, if accuracy of such sources doesn't matter (or is good enough) for casual user...
Given most cooking or recipe websites have been AI slop for a few years now......
I'll stick with my mom's handwritten recipe book.
There are virtually no combinations of food which are toxic, you can mix any food with any food and, while it might not be good, it will still be food. (The only exception I know of is alcohol and mushrooms containing coprine, e.g. inky caps)
Point is, unless you're stupid enough to add glue or broken glass to your meal just because a recipe told you to, it's perfectly safe. More than just safe, LLM recipes these days are utterly boring in their normalacy, and, unlike cookbook recipes, can dynamically adapt to what you actually have in your pantry.
What really sucks is that Google pushed actual content creators out of the way in the first place. That is horrible. I think they should be challenged on this. Food bloggers, recipe writers, and creators have helped shape a huge amount of food culture, and they deserve to be protected rather than erased. If this kind of theft continues from the AI industry Im not sure what type of culture is is going to be left or what it is going to replace it to. I hope humanity is going to find a creative way around it, but I’m also aware how easy to manipulated the masses are.
Their assumption is that all relevant culture has already been invented and capturing the status quo is enough to get 80% of the benefits.
Evidently you're not familiar with Swedish Lemon Angels.
Google already killed cooking websites - when it refused to show them in search unless they added long slop content to it. And it killed blogosphere when it decided blogs wont be found if they just contain content without deliberate SEO play.
And I think the rest of it will end the same way. People will be significantly less eager to do all that free work when no one will be able to find it.
You can also tell the LLM exactly what you have in the fridge or what allergies you have and get customized recipes. It’s just a better experience, 2026 is rough for a recipe site.
Would you trust the tool that recommended putting glue on pizza to give you a good recipe?
I have/make rice starch glue. Can you put it on food? How are you supposed to know whether it's food safe?
Okay, so you don't trust LLM, so you go to a website instead. And... LLM-generated pages are SEO'd to get the top links. So you can't trust any website now (shoot, so much nonsense even before LLM, just more obvious to some of us). So basically everything on a computer is untrustworthy, directly from an LLM or not, unless you got yourself a copy of Encarta '97.
So you pick up a book at the local library. Librarians picked some books to order in subject matters they aren't expert in. How do you know those are accurate and safe? If the book says to use rice starch glue, how do you know the author didn't just copy that from an LLM? Or make it up?
Trust is fading entirely.
Presumably you test some things and use common sense for others. Like if you search for "grain filling oak" using an engine like Kagi(because Google just sells you the same product repackaged over and over) then you'll get people telling you variously to buy this grain filler compound that worked on their particular project, or you get people telling you to use drywall patch compound, or watered down wood filler.
The thing is, these things do produce some kind of result that looks like what you want. But it is still up to you to test these things on a project before you rely on them for whatever it is you really wanted them for, and that requirement doesn't go away just because you sourced the information from some LLM, or a book at the library, or Nick Offerman, or whoever else.
If the user puts glue on their pizza because a computer said so, that's a human problem.
The computer generated recipes can be useful as inspiration, but of course common sense is required.
This "common sense" you refer to, is it the same common sense Babbage was subject to?
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
~ Charles Babbage
Got anything from 2025 or 2026?
AI got better over the last couple of years, and you didn't keep up, and because that's not going to stop, it will eventually become a problem for you.
The fundamental technology is still the same, just with more fossil fuel burning.
> because that's not going to stop, it will eventually become a problem for you.
How? Will it stop being possible to cook without AI?
The fundamental technology is still the same, just with more fossil fuel burning.
That's like saying the fundamental technology behind an Egger-Lohner Hybrid and a Prius are the same. Technically true, but if you use that truth as a basis for decisionmaking, you're doomed. A modern AI model wouldn't make such a foolish mistake, so you'd better not make it yourself.
Current AI models still make mistaKes all the time.
https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:allu5vs...
(Shrug) Ask a free chatbot model and get what you paid for.
Aside from that, please let me know when you find a machine or a human that never makes mistakes. I'd like to invest.
This video tells me otherwise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDQds7VZkfg ( Cold Ones - We Drank AI's Horrible Cocktail Ideas). This is a tongue in cheek response though, as LLMs improved significantly since then.
Is this mushroom edible.jpg
> You can also tell the LLM exactly what you have in the fridge or what allergies you have and get customized recipes.
Can you really though? Are the results delicious? I've never tried that.
It's worse than you think, many recipe sites do not taste test their stuff at all, and often have very stupid instructions.
That being said, an LLM can give creative ideas, mix and match components, but you should not trust the details at all.
Case in point, when "minced meat" and "mincemeat" were mixed up: https://metro.co.uk/2019/12/09/american-website-includes-act...
Damn, TIL. Now “Operation Mincemeat” seems less macabre.
> You can also tell the LLM exactly what
You can - but it's not advisable, not in the least.
It is the same thing as when they pushed for AMP. They wanted to prevent traffic from leaving google.com then too.
In that case at least they could point out that end users got better results with AMP than they do with news sites w/o ad blockers. The AI results are just wrong so often I don't really get it.
> The AI results are just wrong so often I don't really get it
They believe they won’t be wrong for long.
The results are not wrong, they are AI. Google wants that to become a distinct thing that is neither. What's a better answer for Google than one that generates more usage? If we all push in the same direction we can make AI work, we just need to accept we will need to hold its hand for a while.
I think this is sarcastic but man some people really do have some wild defenses for LLM’s so I can’t be sure lol
Maybe it's high time to burn it all down.
Block Googlebot from your sites.
Let's go back to webrings.
It's certainly long been clear that Google is phasing out even the idea that they serve end-users "links" to other websites. They're just refining the idea and making it more and more explicit. It absolutely places them in an obviously adversarial position to every single other website on the Internet, and anyone who continues to cooperate with Google today is probably handing Google the tools to put them out of business. Unfortunately, whole generations of people have grown up learning that the safest and easiest way to navigate to a website is to type some version of the brand into their browser (which Google likely owns outright) and click the first thing Google spits back, so Google enters this battle holding most of the cards :(
Exactly! They also have been letting the results of google search get seriously degraded by ads. Would many people prefer AI over google search circa 2010?
They killed their competition and now they will give you the product that gives them the most money.
Also — it's objectively a better search product to give users what they're looking for right away.
Though that's not to say they're acting altruisticly here.
Google seems to be racing toward a new dark pattern where users learn to trust rely on the AI for neutral, smart objectively correct answers — which boosts trust in its sponsored product recommendations. Super gross.
Why would anyone go to google anymore tho? If it doesn't furnish results it's just a chatbot
I would assume that they've A/B-tested any such important change extensively and basically know that it won't affect their numbers for the worse.
Given my own time at google, I highly doubt these a/b tests are constructed to actually yield a better product rather than push pet products
Then we should take your word over mine. My assumption was that those A/B tests will lead to products that do increase the numbers they were measuring (retention, conversion,...) at the expense of enshittified UX (up to the point of things feeling objectively broken, like notification badges re-appearing for the same items, settings that reset after user changes, search results missing,...). At least that was my explanation for how products by major tech giants like LinkedIn, Facebook, Outlook,... could end up being shipped with such flaws. What would you say?
This has been their MO with their search for a decade+ now. "Native" results hiding actual search results below the fold killed many 2010s era websites that relied on search traffic.
"Greed is bad"
> but it's not Google Search, and when I want Search I want Search.
Not me. I really appreciate having both results simultaneously. I can scan the first couple sentences of the AI response, and if that already has the answer then great. I can expand it to see if there's more.
Or, if I see that the AI mode didn't understand my brief search query, I just glance at the search results below.
And often times, when I do need to follow a link, I find the source result links in the AI mode to be a better quality than the search result links.
It's the best of both worlds.
> I can scan the first couple sentences of the AI response, and if that already has the answer then great.
But how do make the determination that the answer is good and you should stop reading the page? Vibes?
I think it depends on what you are looking for.
Most of the time I'm looking for something very specific that there are plenty of articles about, but clicking on the articles results in popups, banners and an unhealthy amount of scrolling to get to the answer.
AI overview provides me the answer instantly.
Think about suff like "does china borders afghanistan". In those cases you can be confident that the AI overview is right, and saved you time.
If it is a complex or niche question I tend not to trust the overview and go straight for legitimate-looking results
Popups, banners? What are those?
How do you make it without AI ? Are you parsing through millions of pages yourself ?
No, you engage in what appears to be the lost art of media literacy and abrogate high quality sources.
Right, so I have to do manual work going over 10000000 of results ? Or trusting SEO / google algorthm instead ?
No... When did you start using the internet?
great question, probably around 1998 ! How is it relevant to 2026 ?
You seemed confused about how to use a search engine combined with media literacy, thinking you'd have to parse 10,000 results.
The LLM results are presented confidently and succinctly in a way that is designed to tell you “yes” OR, it not applicable, it just mashes together statements (which often leads to a response that contradicts itself one sentence later). That’s not the same as your vetting search results.
Well before Google screwed it all up there used to be some correlation between top hits and what you were looking for. SEO has muddied the waters for many years now and it’s never been truly “merit based” or “objective” or whatever we want to call it, but generally speaking, the first results were the best by default.
That hasn't been my experience. It has been working really well for what I need.
SEO optimization totally ruined google search for me for the past few years
>that hasn’t been my experience
Ok, but it’s been mine. And clearly I’m not alone.
I feel like at this point any discussion about LLM’s has an implied “my experience” because LLM’s are super inconsistent due to not being refined tools at all. I’m sure your experience has been different, just like my experience has been different. I imagine you’ll want to chalk it up to operator error, but it sure seems like a lot of people have variations of my experience. If so many people are operating it wrong, then maybe the tool is poorly designed.
Understand that I use LLM’s pretty frequently. I am not “anti-AI.” I’ve used production tools incorporating machine learning for years now. But LLM’s simply aren’t the bespoke tools that these companies want you to believe, and they are definitely not a suitable replacement for search. It’s simply too inconsistent and will hallucinate answers. Google search didn't make up answers, it presented indexed sources that you ver in real time which I find to be a far superior way to do research. I don’t like having to guess when an LLM is just making shit up as it asserts something with simulated extreme confidence. Not only that, you can take a correct answer from a LLM and just start saying “know that is not right,” and it will start apologizing to you and generating other answers. That is a huge problem! I shouldn’t be able to “convince it” to give me a different answer.
Yes SEO made things objectively worse. Doesn’t mean we need to add another layer of issues on top of that.
Before AI people got the answer they needed from the snippets. That's the level most search queries are at.
Common sense.
The same way I make the determination as to whether a linked search result is good and I don't need to click on another search result.
It's not like non-AI webpages are inherently more trustworthy or anything. The internet is full of misinformation everywhere, you know?
It replaced some of my most used tools with google search. I used to be able to search "define inoculant" and I would get a definition, synonyms, and even a history of the word usage. Now it's replaced by an often mistaken AI summary. Even "inoculant synonyms" doesn't work.
Hope the answer in the AI response is right!
> I truly don't get Google's move.
Users aren't adopting their AI at the rate shareholders expect, so they now force the adoption at the cost of search.
According to Google, users are adopting it. They say AI mode is the most popular feature they've ever introduced, and is driving an increase in total search queries.
>Just one year after its debut, AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users, with queries more than doubling every quarter since launch. As people have realized just how much more Search can do for them, they’re searching more than ever before — so much so that last quarter, we saw queries reach an all-time high.
>Another place where we’ve been rapidly innovating is in the Gemini app. Last year at I/O, the Gemini app had 400 million monthly active users. Today, we’ve surpassed 900 million, more than doubling in a year. In that same time, daily requests have grown over seven times.
Isnt this essentially just slight of hand? Google basically defaults to AI search now doesn't it? So of course it will be 'fastest adopted' it's what is shoved in peoples faces.
If the results are garbage, or people have difficulty with it... Of course number of searches goes up. That doesn't mean the product is better or its not resulting in brand damage.
Don't believe your lying eyes, AI results are better!
These are the same folks that removed the very useful Google cache feature because people weren't using it any more. What they forgot to say is they hid the feature beforehand.
Of course they have more AI queries every day. They have full control over what goes to LLMs and what doesn't.
Really smells like some high-ups' bonus was tied to these KPIs and they're guaranteeing that they can't lose.
While I'm not opposed to the idea that Google AI mode is so good that people use it more, I also feel like the average person only have so many queries per day. Google statement would indicate that people had a number of queries that they just opted to ignore, because find the answers was to cumbersome.
I'm not entirely sure I'm buying that, unless users keep prompting the AI to reduce the amount of reading they need to do. Sort of interrogating the AI, rather than reading a Wikipedia page.
AI mode isn't for queries, it's for questions. You ask it direct, specific things like 'how do I do <x> in <y>' and it provides a fast answer.
People have many more questions in their life than they do queries.
In programming forums like Hacker News people are incredibly detached from the average experience with technology, sometimes it is buffling.
Most non technical people I know asked questions to Google even before the AI overview. Instead of looking for the answer in seo-bloated articles, they find it in the overview.
I think google should improve in detecting the kind of query when I need a link that I don't remember, and deactivate the overview on those. If I search for "ryanair booking" I clearly need the url for booking a Ryanair flight, AI overview is useless
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1497/
If programmers and engineers are saying "why would anyone want that?", odds are the product will be a gigantic success.
The fact that users are using more search queries means they can't find what they want with a lesser number of queries. It seems that Google's PR team doesn't have an incentive to understand that, or thinks that everyone else is stupid.
My guess is that they are spinning it as "users enjoy talking to the AI instead of searching, so they do it more"
Rather than "users don't find what they want with the AI as easily so they have to spend longer with it"
I mean, "AI Mode" is the default result when you Google something, so of course they're seeing high usage. Driving an increase in total queries is probably because instead of just Googling something and getting the right results like it was 10~ years ago, now you have to interrogate a chatbot or try multiple queries. I would think higher total queries is more an indicator that your search function isn't effective.
"I mean, "AI Mode" is the default result when you Google something"
No, it's not. AI mode is something you have to select (in the search window). There is an AI overview provided with your basic search results.
I agree with their assessment that '"AI mode" is the default' - https://ibb.co/Pz9LqKRb.
That's what I get, in the UK, logged out of Google, from a search in Firefox omnibar using "Google" as provider.
I'm aware that they have other things that can be described as AI modes.
That's AI Overview, just like it says at the top of the box.
AI Mode in that screenshot is the tab to the left of All.
this has not been my experience on desktop or Android. did you opt into something? are you accessing via browser search or Google.com?
> Driving an increase in total queries is probably because instead of just Googling something and getting the right results like it was 10~ years ago, now you have to interrogate a chatbot or try multiple queries. I would think higher total queries is more an indicator that your search function isn't effective.
I wonder how much the search results thing is related to language and locality. I have a hunch but I haven't really dug into it.
I live in the US, I speak English, and my browser is normally chrome.
The number of times I've gone to the 2nd page in Google search results you can probably count on one hand in the last 15yr or so.
I use the standard Google search things when I want specifics... Using quotes, site:news.ycombinator.com to search a site, or add a "-" to remove results from that site. I use a "+" when needed. Nothing fancy.
When people say they can't find things in Google search, I'm genuinely baffled. I have a strong suspicion that it has something to do with the combination of browser, locality, and language. Why? Could be tons of reasons for that, some probably anti-competitive on the browser side.
I have tried to use ecosia, start page, duckduckgo, etc. Was never happy with those results and always ended up back at Google search.
I just want to know what's different, you know? I look up some pretty obscure stuff sometimes.
Note: I do normally have my Google account logged in in the browser when doing search, however I have search personalization and history turned off, so that should not be influencing the quality of my search results compared to whatever "baseline" is.
It started when Google made a hard push to improve search for everyday people. They essentially nerfed "expert google skills" to bolster "noob google skills".
Regular people are/were really bad at using google, so google moved towards showing what it thinks you want rather than what you want. They paved over the skill gap between people who understood keywords and word order, and people who just typed in a quasi legible sentence to find something. In doing so though, they killed a lot of skill that people had developed with google for years.
Basically they made the game worse for pros so it could be better for amateurs. I have never heard a non-tech person complain about google getting worse over the years, and they seem to overwhelmingly use AI overviews now too.
> they seem to overwhelmingly use AI overviews now too.
Hard agree. The only thing I've ever witnessed another person do on Google (this is only an incredibly slight exaggeration) is:
1. Type a 'query' - either a brand/website name or some kind of stream of thought like "dishwasher error 03F" (without quotes)
2. Click or look at the very top thing in the results.
This used to mean 80% of the time they'd click the top ad, 20% the top organic result. Then they started putting non-clickable "answers" in that top spot, which would always be accepted as 'the right answer'. When those appeared, approximately no one would ever click any 'blue links.' These started out pretty reliable because they were just direct extracts from sites like IMDB: "Brad Pitt is 44 years old" etc.
Now it's like 60% of the time an ad, 40% of the time their bargain-basement-model "AI Overview" slop. Either way, approximately all users always just use whatever is on top and ignore everything else.
> Either way, approximately all users always just use whatever is on top and ignore everything else.
Wtf
>"a hard push to improve search for everyday people"
Citation needed. A hard push to change their search offering, sure. To improve it? Well, if by improve you mean 'require more interaction and viewing of more adverts on average before leaving' ...
Again, if you have been on HN since 2009, you are likely on the far fringe of Google's user demographics, which at this point is pretty much "The average human being on Earth".
I would bet all of my money that you never once did a Google search (pre-LLM mania, but maybe even after) that looked like
"What kind of clothing is best for when you are going hiking around the lake, so my feet don't get so cold?"
Sadly, this is how most humans have used a search engine for decades now.
Fwiw, I do/did plain language searches for the last couple of years, following Google's lead - I think the more natural language searches have only really been in the last 5 years.
I often use terse searches too, mostly when I forget to write it out longhand to satisfy Google - but either way it's getting less wheat with my vat of chaff in the SERPs and several times recently I've had to re-phrase to get anything useful.
I find that weird assumption. Why would you expect HN people not do such searches? They worked for years.
And you frequently ended up finding a discussion forum with around that question and relevant discussion under it.
Because OG tech nerds would google like
Forum hiking warm socks backpacking trail running
Which was basically a structured programmatic query that activated the old google algo just right.
I just don't know what I'm doing different, I'm just keyword searching and using a couple of inclusive/exclusive flags.
Was I the frog in the pot and now I'm cooked? I don't feel like in search Google any different from maybe 2005 or so.
How do you get the inclusion/exclusion to work? My last few attempts to use “-x” really didn’t exclude what I expected, and almost all the results had “x”. I have seen massive changes since 2005.
how many of those queries contain keyword groups such as "how do i get rid of the AI search?"
> driving an increase in total search queries
I search more when I cant find the thing I am looking for. I search less when I find the thing I am looking for.
Second, it takes additional effort to not do AI search.
Yeah, seems obvious that more searches = results are worse. Who would go "Google sure is good nowadays, I'm gonna ask it for more things than I used to"
> They say AI mode is the most popular feature they've ever introduced, and is driving an increase in total search queries.
Technically, all the people who google "how do I disable this shitty AI mode in google" would count as "driving an increase in total search queries."
An easy way to make a feature popular is to force it on everyone. Then you can pat yourself on the back when 100% of your users are using it!
I remember when Internet Explorer was the most used browser. The fact that people were just using it to download Chrome doesn't matter to stats.
That doesn't make sense. Presumably AI search costs more
I think it's a multifold problem and they've chosen bad solutions.
1. To protect ad revenue they make search results worse to increase the number of searches by making people refine their searches. This made people upset because search result quality went down. 2. "AI everywhere!" put them in a panic, so they shoved am LLM into results, hoping it could pick through bad results and give good data to the user. 3. LLMs are expensive to run, so they're using a cheap model.
Cheap model + bad results = abysmal user experience.
There are too many groups with opposed interests fighting. Ad groups wants worse results so people search more (not realizing this just drives users away). Search groups want a better product so they stop losing users, and the AI group is being given a bad name because management is using their worst AI product on search. So the whole experience is just garbage.
>1. To protect ad revenue they make search results worse to increase the number of searches by making people refine their searches. This made people upset because search result quality went down.
Why would this work? Were yahoo and askjeeves sandbagging their results too just so they can get more clicks?
> Why would this work?
Humans are predictable and hate change. For a short while it DOES work, people are used to great results, assume they're not using the the best keywords, and they'll reformulate their searches. For a while. After a while of all searches being not as good as they used to be, people start looking for other alternatives, which is why DDG is seeing an uptick.
It's called enshittification. It's easier than improving a product.
> Were yahoo and askjeeves sandbagging their results too just so they can get more clicks?
No idea.
I don't know how much control Goog has over Youtube despite owning them but I do note in passing they removed dislikes, removed upload dates (apparently?), removed 5 stars. Easier to trick people into ads
The platform has been various kinds of hostile for a few years now
They probably lose a ton of traffic to AI or anticipate that happening. This is a way to keep people on Google search.
Like you, I use both search and AI separately. Even casual, nontechnical users are starting to work like that. Including AI with traditional search results will keep a lot of users from jumping ship in the first place and will help win back users from ChatGPT.
I know a lot of people hate AI - at a minimum, there’s a vocal minority - but the reality is AI is eating search like nothing we’ve ever seen.
> that can also search the web?
Slight digression: Claude/ChatGPT/etc all can search the web, but Google's AI already has a local copy of the web. It's much faster because of Google's TPUs, but also because Google has a copy of almost the entire web available locally. I recall others testing this and they observe that Google doesn't actually make HTTP requests to sites it references. It just uses its local cache. That's an advantage that all others seem to lack.
Of course, I agree that when I want search, I want search. But personally I've found if I want an LLM to very quickly answer a simple question, the type of thing all of them would do an equally good job on, I prefer Google's for its sheer speed.
I find it useful, and use it almost daily. Helps answer "how to" questions for working on my house, development or just general questions. If I need more info, I just look at the links or videos which are also right there.
To each their own.
On the flip side I retrained myself to ask llm questions on my phone or computer browser search bar with the expectation of getting an llm response toy question with no desire to look at anything else.
If I truly want to search I will ignore the llm results, but I like the convenience of a quick llm search that knows "all the things". I get the answer to my question without searching multiple ad-ridden websites (since the ad provider does all the things)
"I truly don't get Google's move."
"AI" gets higher volume of use than search. This was disclosed by Google under oath
More traffic, more usage time, more data collection
"AI Mode queries are doubling every quarter."
https://www.wired.com/story/even-if-you-hate-ai-you-will-use...
Well, if the marketing teams are being told to reach people using AI or something like that, then Google is just playing to their real customers.
I don't see search and AI as fundamentally distinct things. Usually I just want an answer.
Maybe we use search differently, but I very often don't just want an answer, I want to find a website to help me. Maybe it is because I need to do business with a company and need to find their website to interact with them, or maybe I saw a cool site awhile ago that's relevant to what I'm doing now and didn't bookmark it (because I dropped that habit when Google search was good), or want to read the official documentation about a product I bought, that someone already put a lot of effort into making complete enough and digestible to a wide audience... and the LLM responses tend to get in the way.
Like the parent I use good/paid AI when I want an AI response. So, yeah, an omnibox that knows when I want "an answer" and one that knows when I want to find a thing sounds slightly more convenient than switching between two tools, but Google search is not that Omnibox.
If you don't care about the facticity of the answer, AI is less clicks, granted.
I dont think about less keypresses though - google search would let you type two words and get the thing you know you want, an ai search doesn't really fit the mode that old school search folks were using
For the same reason I read a book instead of just the plot summary on the back cover
You really want to read the author's life story when searching for a recipe? Or wade through some content marketing plug for some vacuum cleaner shop in Albuquerque when all you want to do is figure out how to change filters on your vacuum? There are definitely gems on the web out there, but chances are I'm not discovering them via search, and I'd rather get the straight answer from the AI.
All of this stuff is Google's fault in the first place with page ranking shit they built!
So now you're trusting them to provide the cure?
I thought the same at first, but now I find myself relying on the AI answer (as it is usually reliable) and, also more and more, I continue interacting in the AI mode on the topic that motivated my search in the first place.
They see AI killing the incentive for anyone to produce human-generated content so they're squeezing the last few bucks out of the internet as we know it before it finally goes belly-up.
My read on it is "AI is taking over internet content generation, and we can't filter because we'll end up filtering everything that makes us the most money"
I don't disagree with you, but google search has gone so downhill that I had stopped using it before they moved to the AI approach, which is actually pretty decent.
What if their move is to make AI search horrible so that OpenAI has no moves left here because trust in the product collapses?
> I truly don't get Google's move.
Because the goal is not to provide the best answers.
It's for users to train their AI.
> it's not Google Search
...and it really hasn't been for a good number of years now. I left a while ago when results were all SEO copy pasta blogs this is just a final nail in the coffin.
I imagine most people aren't actually searching the web these days. They're searching for an answer to a question. They already now the 5-10 websites they use and go to those directly. They're mostly living in walled gardens, streaming services, or Amazon. When they use Google they want an answer and AI provides that.
Bad results keep you on their site longer, increasing ad revenue.
Soon, the internet will be so completely full of AI crap enabled by the mega corps that search will be quite a bit less relevant anywho. Maybe google is trying to front run the demise of the internet that they were supposed to protect?
The intention is to kill the web in its current form, obviously. If only 1/3 of their users have left, then it is still a win for them in the long run, as they will gain the fraction of content they directly supply to users. Singularity is here and it's spreading faster than a cancer.
> I truly don't get Google's move.
Because Google wants to kill off its search engine here. It is very clear.
> I assume it's a play to test the waters for how the ad market is going to work, because as a product I really can't see why I would ever use it. Dropbox comment moment incoming?
This assumes that Google search is still a high priority for Google. With their privatized adNetwork, they are trying to get people to trust them, and abuse users via their ads. That is their business model. Google is an adCompany. It stopped being a tech company many years ago already.
Also they control the adMarket for the most part. Just look at youtube.
initially, not a lot of people were using gemini
google pushed it into their other products to attract people to AI
there was and still are a decent number of people who haven't really used it, as crazy as that sounds
they ruined search a while ago and they want to stop the bleeding
Important context: In terms of total share of search a 28% lift for DuckDuckGo rounds down to zero.
The flip side is that multiple AI Search engines have overtaken and lapped DuckDuckGo many many times over in the past year or so.
And its 28% on the noai.duckduckgo.com domain, not in total. So it's even smaller.
could be the AI overlords going there to scrape more data.
From my experience the Google AI mode is more restrictive on what it will let you search for and the content it produces.
I personally have had to use DuckDuckGo to search for things that Gemini finds to be against its instructions to answer.
And I'm not talking about things that are NSFW, but some things that Gemini just doesn't want to discuss.
That's kinda Gemini's problem in general, it just is overly restrictive and doesn't like to talk about anything things that Claude will freely talk about and push against and discuss with you.
You are absolutely right, DuckDuckGo is better for porn than Google, but if you want even better results you can use Yandex.
For other things, Grok is quite fast — Perplexity too
I've been going back and forth between DDG and Google. I have DDG set as default and only use Google if DDG isn't giving me good results.
Same. If I need to Google it, I add "!g" to the search terms.
https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
I use !s for my fallback. I usually don't need the !g unless I want to see CAPTCHAS.
Thanks for the tip; I didn't know about that.
!g is the best of both worlds.
I direct a lot of questions to LLMs, but I want to ask a high-quality model, not the crappy one that Google uses to answer queries. If I'm typing something into Google, it's because I want a search result, not an LLM answer.
I've actually changed that. When I type something into Google it's because I want an LLM answer - their search results have been useless for a while now. But that's only because I rarely use Google these days. I'm mostly using DDG to search (I might try Kagi at some point). Google is relegated to my phone when I want a quick answer where accuracy isn't critical without needing to scroll through a bunch of search results/open and read websites on a small screen.
Kagi, unfortunately, is getting worse too. I think mainly because they don’t get access. But I’m not sure. I had to fallback more and more to Google, because Kagi couldn’t find exact matches, while Google could. Like texts which I copied from a webpage (for example from Android’s source), and it can’t find it.
Its search results ordering is quite good, but the accessible information for them seems to be shrinking. And quickly.
I’m at the point where I don’t search for complex things anymore. I use Kagi for things which can be found with any search engines. Not because I chose it, but because I was forced. This was not the case a few years back, when I started to use it.
Btw, there was one thing with which Google was superior all along: define <word>. And they fucking killed it in the past months, for a far, far worse solution. Nothing comes even close.
I do have to say, and this is from recent observations, not outdated ones, but their AI summaries get things wrong, alot, and these are things that gemini (proper), Claude, or ChatGPT subscription AI's don't get wrong.
I don't know why their AI summary model is so bad, yet when you just click through to AI mode it's miles better...
I've noticed that too. I am sure its because the AI summary runs on almost every query.
It also has to be very fast = small
If I'm typing something into a google it's usually so I can be hit with a Captcha on my home internet connection and then get search results that aren't even any better than DDG. And DDG has a LLM as well.
You've got the captcha issue as well? Seems like it's happening constantly now. I suspect Apple Private Relay has something to do with it, but I'm not sure.
Nope, not exclusively an Apple thing, since I don't use any Apple products at home, and have had an uptick in captcha requests.
If Claude starts sending queries to Google then Google makes you use captcha from that IP, likely you have been using such a bot and it sent queries without you knowing.
only time i ever have to deal with this anywhere (and i move physical sites a lot) is when using a commercial VPN provider. odd.
I wonder if the 28% more visits was mostly among existing users. I skimmed the article and it didn't look like this was broken out. It would be much more impactful/impressive if they brought in a bunch of new users, as opposed to ratcheting up usage among people who were already aware of it.
It's difficult to put my finger on it, but there is something about Google's AI UX that I deeply dislike. It has nothing to do with the quality of the response, which seems fine, but...
The header and input bars are too big. The max width of the response is too narrow. The font is too large. The way it renders onto the page feels weirdly clunky. There is a whole sidebar in addition to the top bar just for two buttons. In the + button under user input, they hide everything under there like model selection even though there's a ton of real estate to the right of it. Everything feels unnecessarily cramped on the page in spite of ridiculous amounts of whitespace.
Yet my ultimate dislike feels like something more than the sum of the parts. It feels like the Yahoo of AI. Anyone not relying on distribution advantages would know they need to do better.
It really speaks to Google's perennial weakness: they can never seem to make an incredible UX.
I guess that's because they hardly ever build a product that's really theirs. Google Cloud came in response to Amazon (who built AWS because they needed it themselves), Gemini came in response to ChatGPT, etc. and it always shows
I'm not sure why people go with DuckDuckGo as their engine as it's just trading Google for Bing. After learning about their deal with Microsoft, I started using Brave Search instead.
It's also pretty ironic for people to ditch Google over ai just to move to another search engine that has AI by default unless you happen to know about the noai subdomain. But it is good that people are willing to break the habit and try alternatives. That's what Google should be scared of.
Because they want something they know that resembles the old Google Search which DDG provides.
28% more of 100 users is still nothing ... who actually uses DuckDuckGo? It seems at least in the german market not relevant and a clone of BING anyways.
It's been my default search for years. Lately for quick one shot AI prompts I use duck.ai (they put some basic effort into anonymizing your chat: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/duckai/ai-chat-... ).
For the search, some of the local results are wrong but I live in a very small area so it may be more reliable for highly populated areas. Lately I've been checking out Kagi for a few things just to see what the quality is like on competition. The anonymized chat (proxy) for AI is cool but very small context limit. Good for looking up random questions and they typically include references.
We have all overused a single solution to "finding stuff on the web": the search engine. Now it's dying, killed by AI and by Google's greed.
There's no alternative left, no webrings, no web directories. If all your content is now only on your server, you're invisible.
I already submitted my take on this to Show HN: https://currantfeed.cc/. Noone gave a shit so it's most likely a very bad idea and certainly a very steep uphill battle. It's basically an Airbnb for websites that by default randomly sorts them and then you can filter by different attributes. Owners have to submit and maintain their "listings". It does have an optional subscription (I'm not sure if it works haven't tested it).
Do your part, link to a website you enjoy.
In some ways the last bastion of the real web are the web comics. Small personal projects where they link to like minded other projects.
I rarely use Google for search, but I've actually gone back a few times just to use the AI search function. Occasionally it is useful, especially when I can't think of the correct term to search for.
But recently I had an entertaining experience with it. I was trying to apply a math technique to an application it wasn't normally used for, and I figured that somewhere out there was a paper or two explaining how to do what I was attempting. So, I tried Googling, and the response was something like:
"You appear to be working with two completely different areas of mathematics, which have absolutely no connections between them. That's fascinating! Would you like to know more about either of these two completely separated subjects which have nothing to do with each other?"
Not useful, Google, but definitely good for a laugh.
I read it because it's shown before search results now but I have to stop myself to not accidentally rely on it. Had two times it misinformed me pretty blatantly and its links to sources are wrong a lot.
in case this point hasn't been made -- what was the baseline for the 28% more visits? duckduck go has like 1-2% search share. So, if there is even a small group of opinionated users who flee google, that would make a big difference. We can't conclude as a result that everyone hates the AI push.
Google has 90% market share. DDG has 0.7%. I don't have a POV on whether AI mode is good or not, but surely there's gonna be some people who dislike it, and even if that's a tiny percentage, it can be a huge boost to DDG.
0.7% * 1.28 = 0.9% market share today.
A large fraction of the people using Google probably have no idea DDG exists. So the backlash is likely significantly larger than just the 0.2% who left to this search engine.
Chrome/Android users in the UE have, at least, heard about DDG.
There have been a few times where I found Google's AI mode useful. But most of the time I just want regular search results.
I'm among the people who finally moved to DuckDuckGo as my default. And for the occasional time when I want some AI mode I know how to get to Google.
To be honest I use Google AI mode a lot. And Duckduckgo for private search. I default to DDG and use !g if I want to resign from privacy or find some merchandise to buy
You mean looking for merchandise is something you're fine being tracked and funneled into the product with the best SEO game?
actually yes. Google has better mechanism of finding the products I am looking for. Some would say this is serene acceptance (fifth stage of grief). Also when tuning my browser too much towards the privacy, I kept getting mugged by "please show all the bicycles on the picture" for too many times, so I acknowledge I will be shoved up in my a...throat with new models of the washing machine I've just bought, and the sexy lingerie for some reason, that I'm not really sure of.
It's the french open. There's always been a bug with google search where sometimes I have to search 'french open' or 'australian open' twice to get it to give me the google scores. That bug still exists, sometimes it just brings up the site, but now it will also sometimes just go into AI mode and it will refuse to get out of it. Like even when you click for otherwise, it will force its way back.
The google live scores is a great feature. But when it's not coming up, even googling "french open google live scores" doesn't just bring it up every single time. It might if you try, but try multiple times over the day...
I like the AI mode, but only because Google intentionally destroyed their search engine. There wasn't any real competition back then, but now everyone has access to AI. They're frantically trying to keep their search engine customers.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Years back Google temporarily put their old database from the good times up for searching. You could actually find technical results reliably. It was so nice.
Makes sense to me. When I use Google, I am interested in getting the information quickly and in the right length and format, and am not interested in navigating to particular page(s) and looking up that info myself. Perhaps this will impact Adwords revenue in the long run but Google will find a way out. If Google didn't have AI mode, I would've stopped using it completely.
I dislike the AI summaries always popping up. I do now see an AI mode button. But so far I am not forced into AI mode. Is this happening for other people?
Append "udm=14" to your Google searches to make this stuff go away (for now, until Google removes it).
You can add a custom search engine to your browser with something like:
Sometimes that will glitch out on Chromium browsers. If so, try this variant:This↑ - I had also jumped ship to DDG until I realized this query string still works on Google.
I'm seeing the same increased activity around my search engine project (https://github.com/asciimoo/hister). While Google's decision is very controversial, it's good to see that people are seeking for alternatives - nice motivation boost to keep developing alternative search projects.
I've been using it a lot in recent months, even though I was very critical about this in the past.
Of course, asking it to give yes/no answers or specific numbers is asking for trouble, but finally I can let something else read the SEOed garbage, point me in the right direction and let me browse the search results in a much more pleasant way than before.
I'm in these stats I think. But mostly because I was trying to do an exact search ("something to search") and discovered that google just ignores it.
There's a local search engine with a motto that translates to something like "Find what you don't know." Google has seemingly adapted "find what you don't want."
I finally switched to duck duck go, not because of the AI push of google, but because of the constant nagging popups to download the google app. Just let me google things in mobile safari in peace!
Oh thank God, I am not the only one here, I mean idk why but I am still not so comfortable with AI mode,and I just need Search, like good old search. I feel this all started when people were saying things like google search is dead or gpt will take over..
Also why is AI mode default?
Wait, Duck Duck Go has some 50 million MAUs and that went to 65 million MAUs or so. Google has 5 billion MAUs, so some 15/5000 users went to Duck Duck Go. That doesn't seem damning. 99.97% of Google users didn't go to DDG.
Yep but most news readers are innumerate and scientifically illiterate so they just get swept up by the narrative.
Well good for them, stop forcing AI on people.
it's a solution looking for a problem and google are desperate to stay relevant there.
We just don't need to search as much. But I _do_ still want to search sometimes, it's still a valid use case, just not as important as it used to be.
But when a do search, I want simple, relevant, external search results so that I can go straight to those good sources. Google isn't satisfied with their returns on that though.
Duckduckgo is blocked in my country. Reddit is blocked in my country. My country is also one of first countries agree to ban free (non playstore) android app installation. My country is so against freedom. What a shitty country.
Which country did this so I can avoid the hell out of it?
Also sorry!
I don't have enough karma to vouch bagols answer, but in case you don't have showdead turned on: they live in Indonesia.
Indonesia
Thank you. I’m sorry :(
... DDG had .7% marketshare (https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share). 28% more visits would take it to .84%. Assuming those all come from Google, that would mean .16% of Google users didn't love AI mode enough to switch.
Classic example of misleading with stats.
DDG is probably regularly growing at ~20%+ anyway...
Google's search volume has been growing 12%+ per year for 20+ years, there's obviously much more room for volatility when you're smaller...
I wonder what other alternative search engines Google lost to besides DDG.
Well... it is still a huge relative increase. And who knows where it could lead them, if they can sustain that sort of growth on a weekly basis...compounding and all...
The headline is implying that AI mode is super unpopular with the very large number "28" and not the more accurate number of .16.
Feels like google is purposely downgrading non-AI search results
They were doing that long before they offered "AI" search results.
AI is downgrading non-AI search results with AI slop pages that get ranked high.
The AI stuff got my wife to switch. So there's that. I've been using DDG for a while.
i started using duckduckgo after google added ai, and it runs way faster [i use lite.duckduckgo.com :3]
edit: my school blocks all search engines other than google though XD
If I want AI, I'll use AI. If I want Search, I want Search. Give me the option. Then again I switched to DDG like, last year.
I’d like to see the total number of visits. Also, I hope no one is reading this as a 28% reduction in Google use.
About a third of the comments on this site are in this genre of: imagine the typical reader is dumber than you so that you can explain things to them.
Why would that be problematic? People are AI outraged. Some of them will move. Those who stay like it better.
How much traffic does ddg get normally? For such a small player, 28% could very well be normal variance.
AI Mode is pretty good. It's quite reliable and much faster than any LLM chatbot.
AI Overviews are pretty bad though.
So a tiny fraction of people left Google to DDG? Seems like they both win.
when I saw this headline my first thought was: wow DDG must not have a lot of users.
I want alternative to YouTube where dislike button count is shown.
If DDG got 28% more visits, Google lost about .6% of their visits.
Both can be true. A small number dropping off could be a big boost for DDG.
For those that don't know, DDG already has an AI mode: duck.ai
Feel duckduckgo can make an API for agent usage of search engine
More like Google started requiring a captcha in Firefox mobile
I remember when I watched a presentation from a Google engineer at a summer school for AI tech last year and I asked why Google shipped AI slop when no one wanted it. He tried to gaslight me saying "users like this feature", and I told him to look up every major forum on the web, there is not a single good comment about Gemini being forced on. Then he said it was just an A/B testing and that not everyone had it enabled by default.
I wouldn't be surprised if they made up the statistics to justify the enslopification.
Go Go DUck Maaan.
Even if the backend is bing, they have somehow made it work. It's is a weird bonus for Microsoft.... If they don't try to copy google they can finally get some search market share!
LOL.
Hopefully this will inspire new teams to create indexed based search alternatives that are free and not enshitified, like google used to be in the early 2010s.
Neither Google nor Kagi has an .onion address. Unlike DDG
Not sure what you use for search, but it could be better ;)
http://kagi2pv5bdcxxqla5itjzje2cgdccuwept5ub6patvmvn3qgmgjd6...
(from https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/accessing-via-tor...)
Thank you. I confess I only looked for it in the HTTP headers, no search
For example, DDG puts it in the content-security-policy header
Instead of move to duck duck go I just stopped using search
I moved from ddg to Google ai. I find it really awesome
As someone who has been driving DDG for the past 6 years, i have switched to Google back due to the new AI mode,, its such a nice quick way to check information and validate ideas.. no friction included.
AI is like sex. I don't mind it, heck in the right situation I'm quite partial to it. However, if you keep trying to sneak it on me while I sleep, keep trying to slip it into agreements, keep involving people i didnt consent to being involved etc. The whole thing takes on a very ugly vibe. In fact I'm going to grow to be quite hostile toward it. Consent matters, not that I'd expect that lesson to land within silicon valley, second most rapey place in the USA after LA.
I hope they use DuckDB
That will fall again and everyone will be back to google
This reminds me when people where moving away from yahoo, ask jeeves to google
People do like AI mode, though just notice the next time someone googles for something they will stop on the AI summary like 99% of the time
The problem with DDG is they don't have their own infra like brave and rely so much on bing...
Yeah, there's no really good option in the search engine space.
> 28% more visits
So, from 3 to 4 people?
The top of every google search result is a confidently wrong chatbot now. It feels like Google has sacrificed correctness, the thing they were great at, the thing that built their search engine into the biggest internet service in the world, in the name of AI.
wheels gotta turn even if driver is heading towards ledge
searXNG dumbojack
The same people who told you Google was going to zero three years ago because Search would become irrelevant are now telling you users will move away from Google because it’s removing Search.
When will people learn that the quality of Google’s leadership is better than that of the average Joe on Hacker News or a random tech journalist writing clickbait articles?
Looks like you're making the common mistake of counting all people you disagree with as the same person. In this case they're clearly different - AI proponents and AI skeptics respectively.
But your 2nd paragraph is spot on.
I'm calling out the "tech opinionist community" broadly speaking. I don't know if it's the same exact people but it's often the same forums or news outlets.
People don't love AI mode. It's just the only way to get good results on Google anymore.
Wonder how satisfied all those new people are with ddg’s results
I never had much luck with it - this mostly covers my experience: https://www.tumblr.com/ddgvsggl
Let’s be honest: ai mode is less shit than the ads that, for some searches, all but replace all legitimate content.
But it is still shit compared to a search engine. Which Google no longer is.
There’s a real opening for actual search engines now.
I just don’t like the name.
I use a mix of Bing (as Edge Is my daily driver) and duckduckgo, and i have to say I rarely need to use Google.
I don't think that's because they are better search engines, but because their usage covers 99% of my queries and some AI like perplexity covers the remaining 1%.
I use DDG but the problem I have with it is that, well, the results just kind of suck. I have slowly used the "!g" operator more and more over the years to the point that now probably 95% of my DDG searches are just Google searches.
Duckduckgo.com has a AI advisor too. I know not of Google's, I really do not give a soft hoot.
The DDG one is good, useful
Also toggle-able with a very visible and accessible widget that remembers your choice.
Consumers have spoken. They hate AI. Woe unto those tech companies who fail to listen. Your competitors will be happy to take your customers.
AI snippets are just terrible, I always just scroll past it. I want to find the website I'm looking for, if I wanted to use AI I'd open up an AI app or website.
If you want to use DDG then go for it. Let people enjoy things, I say. But let's not pretend DDG is suddenly surging, or even relevant really. It's a niche service largely for virtue-signaling by people who insist that "Google sucks". That's their core demographic.
Some Googling claims DDG gets 145M searches per day and claims Google gets ~14B. Well, 14B translates to ~162k QPS. I know for a fact that Google's traffic is significantly higher than that so I'm not sure where that claim comes from.
I honeslty don't believe a significant percentage of Google users even know Sundar made a statement about people loving AI mode or would even care, one way or the other. This is just more marketing fluff trying to will DDG growth into existence.
I am trying to find a replacement for google search.
DuckDuckGo was also useless. Qwant just copy/pastes Google's awful UI.
We kind of see that all search engines suck now, but in many cases there is no real reason why that should be the case. For instance, why did Qwant copy/paste Google's horrible UI? There is no logical reason for this other than trying to bait in people who like the Google search UI. I don't like that UI Google chose since like 10 years or more; Google ruined its search engine already way before AI.
We really need a search engine that works and isn't control by a greedy, Evil adCompany. DDG isn't the answer; neither is Qwant.
0.1% to 0.128% is 28% as well
DuckDuckGo have to change their brand name if they want non-technical people to take them seriously
This has been my issue with DuckDuckGo from the start... it needs to be something a little more catchy and that rolls off the tongue. Saying "I'll DuckDuckGo it" feels so clunky. As small of a gripe as it sounds like, it really does matter.
But none of Google's alternative sound any better.
I'll bing it.
I'll brave it.
I'll ecosia it.
I'll kagi it.
I'll startpage it.
I'll yandex it.
Okay "I'll brave it" does sound fine, especially in our brave new world, but it's still ambiguous when speaking it.
Duck it isn't bad. My order for best private search engine goes brave>Kagi>Duckduckgo=startpage
Kagi's -> 'fetch it' (dog mascot play)
No need to turn a brand into a verb for this.
You look it up.
I'm not saying that it necessarily needs to be a word that's easily turned into a verb, but it certainly doesn't need to be quite such a mouthful
I still use google as a verb even though I use Kagi.
Duck it.
Mind the F being dangerously close to the D on most keyboards here :-)
I'll have to see Google's stats as well. I went the other way leaving DDG for google AI mode. I use ddg still if I just want it to find a site. if I want answers, I use Google.
I would say it's more than visits that count, how many people are staying in the DDG or Google home page doing things? a lot more with Google I'd think. they've succeeded in trapping me in their product, instead of navigating away, and I'm happier for it. And... i still don't get what people's problem is (quality wise that is), you don't have to use AI results right, and it's pretty obvious what the AI interaction portion of the page is? I'm sure ad blocker extensions can remove it entirely as well. DDG's quality is not just lower, it requires me clicking around to get AI assisted summary.
I just don't get it, is people's time not valuable? even if half the time the AI results are wrong, it offsets (for me - and it's more like 5%) the time I waste clicking on random sites, some of them ad-trodden (where a blocker isn't available), outdated,etc.. and I usually don't even go to the second page of the result where as the AI reviews more than the first page or two to give me a summary. I'm saving lots and lots of time, getting more done with it.
This is tech, not religion, but it feels like people are conflating the two. it's just a tool that's used to search things.
Ai is free now, how cool. Now we make an agent that uses google search ai in playwright.
Yeah, nowadays it is a tragedy to find anything useful on the first results page.
Alternative search engines are popular with the tech/HN bubble. Other than Bing, they have no palpable market share. Google does not care about said bubble because it mostly overlaps people who would use an adblocker anyway and who are capable of finding their way around other for-profit restrictions (i.e. downloading videos with yt-dlp instead of paying for YT Premium).
DDG has <1% market share, so +28%, while encouraging, means nothing for the monopoly. I use it. I use Brave Search as well. Paid for Kagi for a while.
But getting people to use anything other than Google (or the default Bing for on Windows) is nearly impossible at scale.
Both statements can be true, you know.
Some people can love AI mode while others hate it.
that 28% is what, 3 people?
maybe AI agents prefer duckduckgo?
I’m now paying for Kagi :/
New Google -> perfect example of en$hi++ification.
Google is the OG of enshittification. When DoubleClick bought Google, I mean when Google bought DoubleClick, that is when Google started printing money in exchange for a terrible user experience.
Google bought DoubleClick in 2008. That's nearly 20 years back. Either you're suggesting Google Search has been bad for 20 years, or you're just being willfully ignorant.
What is the source of these numbers? Where is the DDG statement posted? Techcrunch? Thurrot? Links to links to links to nothing
You know what is crazy, that this whole bullshit "MDC" garbage "API" that websites and stuff like Outlook have is stuff that they could have had by having SIMPLER settings in their services, they obfuscate them like hell then they give the "solution" simple API to agents so that THEY can easily use their services, but not humans.
It's so disgusting, I hate this industry.
AI mode isn't that terrible.
AI summary isn't bad at all, but people don't understand it and Google hasn't explained it very well. It is just RAG. It is a summarization of the documents that are on the first page of the SERP. People think it is answering their question independently, but that's not what it does. It takes the docs that are top ranked from web search and digests them.
The corresponding "AI overview" feature of Gmail is amazing. It digests the messages that match your search. Because it is using your own docs, the output is way better. Or, at least, mine is. Maybe your inbox is full of lies but mine isn't.
People understand it. They dislike it. Users want what they want. When Software companies purport to know better... they do themselves and their customers a disservice.
"Google’s AI Overviews Don't Have an Off Switch. 4 Tricks to Return to Traditional Web Results" - https://www.pcmag.com/explainers/googles-ai-overviews-dont-h...
they dont even recommend using a different search engine? shame on them.
why bother fiddling with url parameters or switching entire browsers when you can just go to one of many other search sites?
this is just an ad for brave being disguised as something 'helpful'.