Google AI responses are generally crap and annoying. I've gone back to DDG or if I need some context - very specific guidance for claude/chatgpt. Goodle's AI is generally inadequate or wrong without significant clarification.

LLM-written article.

I don't want either, if I'm indeed "searching." But I find that often times I am indeed just looking for a quick answer, and Gemini/Google's "new" search does it fine.

It's one of the few AI features, despite still being shoved in my face, that I actually find useful.

With that said, the worst thing is how search results have degraded significantly since the AI years, even before they added the actual "AI mode."

Google now (and quite a few search features on other services, e.g., Twitter) often returns results that have ZERO relationship to the search keywords I gave -- like an entirely different person when searching for a person's name, which I think should never happen and did not happen when search was still based on a "rigid" algorithm of indexed content. So, I can only assume it's because they have some AI thingy along the process.

I always ignore AI summaries, after having seen just how wrong they can be.

Here's a relevant example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44142113

If you're like me, basically everything other than search results in a search engine is noise. To that end, I direct my Google searches directly to the "web" tab of the results. This chops off news, shopping, video, images, etc from the initial results you see but you can still change to those tabs just as easily as ever. In your browser's settings just find the option to manage search engines, add a new one, and set the url to use to https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 and you land on results. No AI misinterpretation of what you're looking for. No confident nonsense that directly contradicts reality sitting at the top of the page. No judgement or chiding (Google's results AI has flat out told me my opinion sucks mid-search more times than I'd like to admit). Just results.

Maybe it’s misplaced nostalgia but google search before google plus ruined the +, and the image search was top tier (not shopping ads) - truly incredible the signal to noise you could find.

Now all the junk comes to the top and the sites you get all have ads and modal popups or sales funnel flows

I hate those AI summaries. Because I dont necessarily agree with suitability and credibility ranks assigned by AI to make those summaries. As author says, there are so many nuances and I usually scan the results page and click that appears more credible first. Not what appears first. I also know which site fills copy with verbiage and which ones give more useful advise - such as in health matters.

Great points..

Well tech companies have long been hijacking our brains thinking muscles. Remember how people used to be able to navigate on their own without a Maps app, now those same people can't get around their own town without their phone.

I'm genuinely scared for a generation of people who've offshored their thinking, planning and creativity muscles to a few tech companies.

We think we're gaining an edge but we're really participating in a mind control experiment thats optimized to benefit those companies, not us as individual.

Miss me with AI, it will break your brain and start to control more and more of your behavior if you let it. Don't become a drone. You're not going to become some crazy productive SaaS founder becauae you have AI, you'll become a drone who's competency is 1:1 correlated to the quality and quantity of tokens you have access too/

Couldn't disagree with the article more. Not wading knee deep through SEO chaff is probably my favorite thing about LLMs. In the rare circumstance that I feel the need to wade through chaff that option is of course still available to me.

"Search" is a ridiculous thing to be doing post-2022. Imagine going to a doctor and asking them a question, and they give you 5 printouts for your to read through to synthesize your own answer. Imagine you asked your spouse a question and they responded "Here's 10 links for you to check out!"

We have AI now and it's doing a mostly incredible job getting us ANSWERS, not SEARCH LINKS. Trying to pretend that links are better is just trying to copy with rapid change.

Quite honestly I'm shocked that Google keeps making more money with search ads because I don't search anymore, I get answers directly from it or ChatGPT without clicking on any links.

LLM-written article about hating LLMs

I love AI summary and AI mode in Google search. I think it should be up to you (the human) to use your judgement to decide when to do further research by following the links and when to just rely on the AI summary. If I'm searching a TV show by name, I'm generally just looking for an overview, the IMDb rating and a review of that show. If AI summary gets that wrong, it's not the end of the world. I don't bother doing further research. There are a lot of such casual searches I do daily for which AI summary is good enough.

OTOH if I'm looking up an answer to a tax question, I don't just immediately trust the first answer from AI mode. I use it more as a knowledgeable friend who is not a tax attorney and so cannot be 100% trusted, but he/she is giving me useful pointers to go do deeper research and arrive at an answer.

Kagi handles this perfectly, IMO. Defaults to normal search, but invokes an LLM if a `?` is appended to the query.

I like "search assist" in ddg.

companies deliberately obscure some information and it helps.

  how much does "<product>" cost  

  what is the phone number for "<company>"

Isn't a search engine for finding information?

why do people trust the AI overview over the Im feeling lucky button?

I disagree strongly with the premise:

> When you search for something, you're usually not looking for a sentence. You're looking for evidence.

There is a long and storied history of Google offering more than just a list of links to go search for, since at least 2012, because a massive amount of people literally are looking for the single answer to a question, whether stated explicitly or implicit in the search term.