- 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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Technofascists really benefit from certain kinds of information being inaccessible…
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To borrow Alex Jones’ term - it is information warfare. Train people to accept the outputs of LLMs, attack media literacy (in conjunction with the fact that public schools in the US spent ten years not teaching children how to read), and hide actual sources.
You can have your LLM trained to weasel around the fact that the chattel slavery of black Americans was the primary cause of the Civil War, or falsely represent science surrounding gender and sexuality (they’re explicitly tuning Grok on this).
You don’t have to worry about subversive messages on war or women in your “AI” generated “Ghibhli” film. Have all the fun space faring of Star Wars, without the prequel geopolitics everyone hated until they saw it happen.
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I’m stoned so:
The technocrats (Bezos, Thiel, Zuckerberg, etc) are SEELE. Musk is Gendo - ie, at the table but rogue (and I don’t want to imagine what he’d do with a planet full of Yue/Rei’s) Thiel doesn’t trust Musk, so Vance is like his Kaji. (Misato is like literally a Freud caricature of a woman, so we can make her a couch to fit the whole sexual ethos)
COVID was the second impact. The angels are attendant disasters that go with it and things like climate change etc.
Luigi is Kawori, a gorgeous bisexual twink who is being crushed by the system.
The American people are Shinji, paralyzed under stress and trauma. Asuka is a bunch of other countries, being very angry at Americans for not doing shit while not really coping with their own problems.
Rei is obviously the internet/technology.
The globalists have been priming us for this information the entire time! Pre programming! Please buy my protein power.
They did that long before AI.
Google, Apple and plenty others have regular meetings with defense people to accomodate them.
No surprise Eric Schmit left Google to form a defense company since some employees there had a consciense and didn’t like working on killer drone programs.
I’m decrepit enough to remember pre-Google web, with competing search engines. Bring back webrings!
Please! We need more competition for Google.
Altavista baby.
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.
Why is everything shit
Capitalism. Next question…
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.)
Who asked for this?
Unlike most of Lemmy, I actually like AI and even I don’t want this.
Which is EXACTLY why I just moved to using Vivaldi browser and StartPage as a search engine. Fuck these guys.
Can it be worse than the sanitised results they give you now?
Yes absolutely
Embrace, extend, extinguish, but now it’s Google doing it to the World Wide Web.
Sounds cool, can’t wait!
AI is over hyped and doesn’t need to be shoved in our faces. Ugh.
It’s another tech bubble like the dot com bubble. But at this point, the AI bubble, the crypto bubble, and the capitalism bubble will all crash at the same time as the world economy falls apart and we end up in another global war. I guess the accelerationists that survive will get their wish and see what remains and if it’s the neofuedalist white supremacy utopia they dream of
…hmm that’s kind of shitty and it uses ten times more energy! Let’s go full enshitification!
I don’t get what they gain out of this, doesn’t it remove the sponsored results? Or will people pay to nudge AI weights to recommend their products?
Example:
How do you make the best cookies diy?
…the new Nabisco Cookies can be crushed to a fine powder mixed…
What are other non-nabisco cookies I can cook?
…Nestle chocolate chip cookies of course!
Remember to protect your cookies with NordVPN!
Been using 4get for some time now, I don’t think a search engine can get better than this
I looked into this a while back and came to the conclusion that the dev didn’t seem trustworthy. Also, just looking on the homepage, the images it showed me were a dildo with “4get” stuck on it using a sticky note and a modified manga panel about beating women. Not sure I’d want to use something like that in public.
Not sure what I expected. For the equally curious with no foresight:
definitely a dildo with 4get stuck on it using sticky note
Uh… The spoiler didn’t work for me. Good thing I’m not in public 😂 Also - WTF? Why??
:( sorry to hear that. Out of curiosity, what app/UI are you using?
Sync for Lemmy, on Android. Tbh for some reason spoiler tags seem generally somewhat unreliable on Sync. Either way don’t worry about it too much.
Honestly that type of anti-corporate imagery makes me trust them more
yeah, the dev seems kinda like a shitposter ngl (although there are some funny pictures in the front page)
However, I configured it as my default search engine, so I never go to the front page. Also, at least is free and open source (AGPL)
Why not just use searxng or startpage?
Well, 4get use a scraper, so I can use searxng, startpage or any other indexer with it (including DuckDuckGo, google, yandex etc). And another thing is the fact that almost every instance has support for Tor hidden services (which I use). But in the the end is more of matter of preference, I’m more of a fan of the less modern frontend
Some searx instances have Tor as well ¯_(ツ)_/¯ But yeah, fair enough. I personally wouldn’t thrust a site with a massive dildo on the frontpage but to each their own haha
Stick to SEARCH, not making shit up (euphemistically called “hallucinating”).
