- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
Google has become so integral to online navigation that its name became a verb, meaning “to find things on the Internet.” Soon, Google might just tell you what’s on the Internet instead of showing you. The company has announced an expansion of its AI search features, powered by Gemini 2.0. Everyone will soon see more AI Overviews at the top of the results page, but Google is also testing a more substantial change in the form of AI Mode. This version of Google won’t show you the 10 blue links at all—Gemini completely takes over the results in AI Mode.
This marks the debut of Gemini 2.0 in Google search. Google announced the first Gemini 2.0 models in December 2024, beginning with the streamlined Gemini 2.0 Flash. The heavier versions of Gemini 2.0 are still in testing, but Google says it has tuned AI Overviews with this model to offer help with harder questions in the areas of math, coding, and multimodal queries.
With this update, you will begin seeing AI Overviews on more results pages, and minors with Google accounts will see AI results for the first time. In fact, even logged out users will see AI Overviews soon. This is a big change, but it’s only the start of Google’s plans for AI search.
Gemini 2.0 also powers the new AI Mode for search. It’s launching as an opt-in feature via Google’s Search Labs, offering a totally new alternative to search as we know it. This custom version of the Gemini large language model (LLM) skips the standard web links that have been part of every Google search thus far.
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startpage. you’re welcome.
it’s also not us owned or based.
Startpage is owned by System1 who are based in LA.
But start page just returns Google and Bing results. If Google stops offering it, then you’re left w/ Bing. Microsoft has its own AI thing going, so if Google kills search, so will Microsoft.
Unfortunately it’s been sold to the US.
well that’s not good :/ sigh
Well you already said I’m welcome, but thank you anyway.
This is my choice
Been using Ecosia for months now. DuckDuckGo and Startpage before that. I’m pretty happy with Ecosia search results, can’t complain.
Because it isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough and my favourite now. And they are the only consumer tech company I know of having such a positive impact on the environment worldwide.
I’ve tried so many different search engines over the last year to try getting rid of Google and ecosia seems pretty good, also I still use yandex pretty often
Would this be the same AI that spits out incorrect summarys or just flat out gets data incorrect constantly? What could possibly go wrong by making that the ONLY way to look for things going forward. Fucking morons.
I recently had a dream that involved a suburb of Green Bay, Wisconsin. I have never been to Green Bay Wisconsin. I know it as a rather small city that is the home to the Green Bay Packers, an administratively anachronistic NFL team that draws a large plurality of its fan base from the greater Milwaukee area. Off the top of my head, I don’t know if Green Bay has “suburbs” in the usual American sense at all.
I googled the name of this completely nonexistent community, along with the words “Green Bay,” and the AI very confidently hallucinated it into existence, describing it as a lovely shopping and residential area just over the bridge of the same name.
Yup. No problem though. In the future AI can just add the now very real town to you AR eyeballs brought to you by Chipotle Exxon and T mobile.
No, this will be the AI that ignores your content and just spits out sponsored content. AI doesn’t really have to be involved much, but if it is, Google doesn’t have to pay up when you file a class action lawsuit for misleading content because they can say “It’s not our fault, thr AI did it.”
Hmm, in theory I don’t have a problem with an AI telling me the answer to my question or whatever I’m searching for - but this isn’t a web search. If I’m actually searching for a particular page or context, then I want to be able to do that.
These are two entirely different things, and if Google goes down this route they aren’t a search engine anymore - they are an LLM provider.
Couldn’t agree more. I use both tools as they have their place, but when I want a search engine, I don’t want to get an AI answer for the result. Like if I’m searching for documentation on something, what benefit would the AI provide me over just giving the link?
Yes, the problem is that the place for LLM “search results” is the garbage can.
I didn’t expect this. You mean it doesn’t have ads? All I tend to get for hits on Google are paid search results anyway. Surely they’ll soon bring some ad links into these results.
Like all Google products, they will still make a halfhearted attempt to make it as useful as they can before absolutely destroying it with ads
this sounds like what Google wanted to be since its inception: ask a question, get an answer
somewhere along the journey, the reality of needing to make money drove the enshitification of search results: ask a question, get offers to sell you an answer
this seems like a step in a better direction
Right because when I search for factual information what I really want is an LLM to tell me “sorry Dave I can’t answer that question right now.” (See: any election related information. As in it doesn’t just kick you back to the web search results it just straight up refuses to give you the answer.)
It baffles me how wholly some people are just accepting the complete erosion of the internet. I have lecturers at university, so theoretically educated people, who tell us point blank to plug any questions we have about weekly topics into ChatGPT. The respect I have for these teachers and their content is less than zero at this point.
Then you have to check those answers, so you need to search for an authoritative source anyway… which means you need a regular search engine. At that point you may as well have used the search engine in the first place.
If Google does this, you’ll need to find an alternative search engine to check Google against… so you may as well just switch to a different search engine in the first place.
There are things that LLMs are good at, being a search engine isn’t one of them. Although I have asked searchy type questions and got some interesting links back which I probably wouldn’t have found on a normal web search with the terms I was using, so they can be useful as a supplementary search tool. I’d rather that than it just giving the answers, which then need to be fact checked elsewhere.
At that point you may as well have used the search engine in the first place.
I was going to respond to this but I think you did so yourself:
I have asked searchy type questions and got some interesting links back which I probably wouldn’t have found on a normal web search with the terms I was using
I think they work as supplements and not replacements. As any tool, they have their use and (for me) can enhance my searching. But I would not replace it with only LLM. (Altough I have never had any great luck with ChatGPT and links, they never work - as in ChatGPT give me an anchor element without any link. It’s better at providing me search terms and concepts to look up for what I need.)
The future is coming and it sure looks like garbage. I have long since left Google behind.
It’s been a long time I use DuckDuckGo for common searches (which let’s be honest, more than 80% is just a simple query to find a certain area of some website, like “Firefox download Windows”). If I want to search something more related to my own language or recent events in my county, Google is a must, but that’s like 10% of all my search engine usage. I don’t really need Google to know about the other 90%.
I had to ditch ddg when they started injecting my vpn’s geoip as a search term in almost every search. It was to the point where I could literally be including an actual city and state as a search term and I would mostly get results for the vpn’s location. Naturally there is no option to disable this behavior.
Startpage is nice though.
Yeah I think most of my searches start with the name of the site I want results from.
This is exactly why I’m working so hard to eradicate the verb “to google” from my vocabulary. I switched to DuckDuckGo (which then started providing AI summaries, but allowed an easy opt-out).
Even better, use the google verb to refer to searching anywhere other than Google and effectively genericide it.
I noticed today that UDM mode for Google is displaying sponsored results now, too…
https://www.google.com/search?q=drp&udm=14 still works for me…
It’s never not worked, but they’re running sponsored links now. I’ve hit them 3 times today out of maybe 50 searches. But they’re there.
yeah udm14 getting pretty bad lately. That is why I moved to startpage which is same Google services without AI and sponsored contents
How many cases of “You should eat at least one small rock per day” AI bullshit does Google think is acceptable for production deployment?
More than zero, which is too many for my taste.
I was just dealing with a plumbing problem the other day, and I was like, “I know, I’ll ask AI!”
Basically everything it told me was completely wrong. And this was Claude Sonnet 3.7, one of the best!
Wait…you shouldn’t be doing that? Damnit! What am I going to do with the small rock mine I just bought?!
The AI suggests painting it and adding it to a garden as decoration.
Dear Google,
Literally no one wants this.
Nope. Plenty of people want this.
In the last few years I’ve seen plenty of cases where CS undergrad students get stumped if ChatGPT is unable to debug/explain a question to them. I’ve literally heard “idk because ChatGPT can’t explain this lisp code” as an excuse during office hours.
Before LLMs, there were also a significant amount of people who used GitHub issues/discord to ask simple application usage questions instead of Googling. There seems to be a significant decrease of people’s willingness to search for an answer regardless of AI tools existing.
I wonder if it has to do with weaker reading comprehension skills?
I think it’s simply that getting a direct answer is easier than reading different forums with different views and come up with your idea. That doesn’t mean people want google search to stop searching. We have gemini, if I want to use gemini I can go to gemini. I don’t get why everything has to be AI. We can have multiple tools, not everything out there is a nail.
Somehow I disagree with both the premise and the conclusion here.
I dislike a direct answer to things as it discourages understanding. What is the default memory allocation mechanism in glibc malloc? I could get the answer sbrk() and mmap() and call it a day, but I find understanding when it uses mmap instead of sbrk (since sbrk isn’t numa aware but mmap is) way more useful for future questions.
Meanwhile, Google adding a tab for AI search is helpful for people who want to use just AI search. It doesn’t take much away from people doing traditional web searches. Why be mad about this instead of the other true questionable decisions Google is doing?
Technology Connections posted a very great video about this recently. Algorithms are breaking how people think and lulling them into complacency, losing the ability to think, research, discern. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJpZjg8GuA
I’m decrepit enough to remember pre-Google web, with competing search engines. Bring back webrings!
Altavista baby.
Please! We need more competition for Google.
sometimes you just gotta ask Jeeves
The fact that Ask Jeeves isn’t an AI-only search engine is just beyond me. It was laughable that someone thought to personify a search engine 25 years ago, but now is pretty much the right time for that.
Sounds cool, can’t wait!
Why is everything shit
Capitalism. Next question…
Can it be worse than the sanitised results they give you now?
Yes absolutely
