11 ms·

Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

470 points by chuckwnelson 2y ago

ethagnawl 2y ago
> Google is losing trust with all these buzzing results, and its answer is to throw more jam at the wall to see what sticks. But this just attracts more flies. If you're going to work the metaphor, work the metaphor!
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animanoir 2y ago
Still using Google I see? How primitive..
- hammock 2y ago
  What do you use?
  - animanoir 2y ago
    Kagi.
RF_Savage 2y ago
The Yahooification of Googles search becomes more amusing when one considers that it is now led buy the dude who ran Yahoo search to the ground.
- BadHumans 2y ago
  Not anymore. Prabhakar was promoted from Head of Search to Chief Technologist whatever that means.
- lelandfe 2y ago
  Prabhakar Raghavan was recently "promoted" out of that: https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  Given how Vivek and Elon kicked the hornets nest about this, I wonder if there will be blow-back at Yahoo. A lot of people don't realize that Yahoo basically only survives today off the back of H1b labor.
  - smt88 2y ago
    Every large tech company only survives because of H1b labor.
fratlas 2y ago
People want to spend less time on a task. Whichever tool succeeds at this will win.
- m0llusk 2y ago
  Time on task only matters for the lowest paid. At high levels robust, predictable, and other characteristics compete strongly for value. Do you want the most accurate medical diagnosis or the fastest?
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    Is that your typical search engine use case or are you more likely trying to find out when the taco stand opens?
    - openrisk 2y ago
      There is no "typical" search engine use case. The fallacy that there is such a thing is a big part of the problem. The enshittification and decline of the digital window to the internet is so complete that even basic information management tools like browser bookmarks are deprecated: people will "search" even for sites they use repeatedly. Minimally there needs to be a transparent split between commercial queries (searching to buy something) and knowledge / abstract queries (searching to learn something). Users should be context aware (ideally using completely separate tools) of when they are simply accessing a pay-to-play online product catalog versus when they are querying what is effectively a decentralized wikipedia. Commingling the commercial with the factual was always going to be a dead-end.
    - pessimizer 2y ago
      So you want the answer to when the taco stand opens to be quick and wrong? That's possibly the biggest waste of my time you could think of, because I'm probably going to have to spend a half-hour and a trip out of the house finding out that the answer was wrong. I'd rather get the answer in 5 minutes and for it to always be right. Dying in an accident coming back from a taco stand AI didn't know closed 6 months ago would be the worst death.
CM30 2y ago
The question of course is how well that level of quality will hold up now that more and more of the internet is AI generated, and said AI generated content is being sourced for said AI tools. It feels like our choices are either to only get information from a certain time period or earlier, or to accept the information provided by Open AI and co is only going to get worse and worse over time...
omolobo 2y ago
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binkHN 2y ago
> Enter 2024 with AI. The top 20% of search results are a wall of text from AI... I'll be the contrarian here and say I actually like Google's AI Overview? For the first time in a long time, I can search for an answer to a question and, instead of getting annoying ads and SEO-optimized uselessness, I actually get an answer. Google is finally useful again. That said, once Google screws with this and starts making search challenging again, as it has been for years, I'll go elsewhere.
- lm28469 2y ago
  > I can search for an answer to a question and, instead of getting annoying ads and SEO-optimized uselessness, I actually get an answer. You get the average of the seo optimized answers
- pishpash 2y ago
  It's wrong enough and unsourced enough that it's more cognitive load to vet the result than not having it. Google is barely more useful because of this.
  - deleted 2y ago
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- m_ke 2y ago
  It would be great if it wasn't completely wrong 50% of the time.
  - jsheard 2y ago
    The mark of a great product/feature is always when they feel the need to force it on users, because they know that a significant portion of users would switch it off if they could.
  - binkHN 2y ago
    I find it mostly right 70% of the time.
m_ke 2y ago
SEO ruined the web, guided by Google's ranking algorithm. Things will get even worse as scammy companies start flooding the web with LLM generated content pushing their products to bias LLMs to increase the probability of outputing their name for keywords related to their business.
- wwweston 2y ago
  Libraries and librarians are starting to seem very relevant again. As are journalistic institutions.
  - giraffe_lady 2y ago
    What a relief then that those are all healthy, well-supported organizations with bright futures. It's not a coincidence that the solution to this problem is exactly the organizations that are being systematically undermined and dismantled.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      They aren't being undermined and dismantled, they're dying of the same cancer search is, and one they contracted voluntarily: advertising.
      - giraffe_lady 2y ago
        Libraries are?
        TeMPOraL 2y ago
        I meant journalistic institutions. Libraries themselves are a special thing - they've been invented before intellectual property was a thing, and have been attacked by IP proponents ever since. In this way, they're very much like LLMs, and many of the arguments against LLMs trained on copyrighted material apply just as much to public libraries. Oh the irony.
KaiserPro 2y ago
chatGPT offers bullshit answers faster, and more confidently. However the issue for openAI is the cost of business is _horrifically_ expensive. Sure they charge some users for premium access, but they aren't currently enough to cover costs. openAI needs a step change in performance, and that meta doesn't release an open-source version of it and a step change in compute efficiency.
- jeffbee 2y ago
  Is it faster? I just did similar queries to the ones in the article and ChatGPT (web) spent a long time with an animated "Searching the web" placeholder, then served an error.
  - KaiserPro 2y ago
    for searching the web, probably not. For the "whats the difference between tiffin and rocky road" its probably much quicker. However if you want to get _more_ information, or assess if thats bollocks or not, its much slower and click-ier
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    jeffbee - this is an unrelated comment because I need to follow up with you on a comment you made (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41873615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41873615) a couple of months ago. Could you reach out via email to paul@linuxaudiosystems.com ? Thanks. I'll delete this comment in 24 hrs.
eastbound 2y ago
So, as a company, when can I pay OpenAI to twist its responses towards my company? Because it will happen. I’m afraid that ChatGPT is my friend for 20€ today, but prices will increase and response quality will go the way of Siri.
- sumedh 2y ago
  > when can I pay OpenAI to twist its responses towards my company? They are probably thinking about it. ChatGpt will become one of the most valuable company if they can pull it off and still keep the users happy.
h_tbob 2y ago
I for one love the “wall of ai” this author decries. It is super helpful for most of the questions I ask. I don’t know why he doesn’t like it.
- deleted 2y ago
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zknowledge 2y ago
Definitely agree, but I'm surprised Perplexity wasn't mentioned in this post. It's currently Perplexity Vs. Google
- Deegy 2y ago
  Once chatGPT and Claude (through MCP) added web search functionality I completely dropped Perplexity. I assume I'm not unique in this regard. Feels like the writing is on the wall for Perplexity.
  - weberer 2y ago
    Could you explain more? Are the results better, or are there other features?
    - neonbrain 2y ago
      I assume he's just being over dramatic. I use Perplexity every day, multiple times per day, and it almost completely replaced Google for me in such areas as coding or technological research. Also, I never used nor planning to use ChatGPT or Claude (I use private open models instead - Mistral Nemo, Qwen, etc.). But I also feel like "I'm not unique in this regard", lol.
    - Deegy 2y ago
      It's mostly a decision to manage the total amount I spend on LLM tools. Given unlimited money I suppose I'd still be subscribed to Perplexity because the UI is slightly better than Claude and chatGPT for web results. But Claude and chatGPT are plenty enough for my web use cases while allowing me full access to all of their models for non web search use cases.
  - hombre_fatal 2y ago
    Yeah, I keep using the $1/mo promotions for Perplexity but I only really use it because it can read the results to me which I use for practicing foreign languages, so there's that.
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msoad 2y ago
I remember when the more tech savvy folks were migrating from Altavista and Yahoo to Google because they understood it is better sooner than others. The same thing is happening. I consider myself tech savvy (still!) and I have to admit that I rarely use Google for all sort of information. As a side note: I am using Safari and I noticed that Apple's search is also replacing my Google searches. In the past if I knew name of a company or organization but not their website I'd Google it. Now I put it in the address bar and Safari very often finds the website for me.
- wwweston 2y ago
  Of course the savvy are using LLMs now, but they’re also reckoning with two things: * you have to check an LLM result, especially if it cites something (because it may or may not exist) * you can’t cite an LLM result It’s a useful tool, but it lacks certain utility features that a useful web + effective search has. Or had.
  - maximus_01 2y ago
    100%. But gradually being solved as source links are being provided. If the source link is as good as what you’d find on Google anyway then you have a way better search experience and don’t really burn much extra time checking the LLM work
  - weberer 2y ago
    Even without using LLMs, Duckduckgo is good at providing little widgets that just give you a straight answer. Try searching "150 usd to eur" or "Weather Philadelphia".
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    > Of course the savvy are using LLMs now I don't think this is true at all. It is people prone to hype, or who are naive, who are using LLMs. The savvy know that a tool which you have to verify every single time (because it isn't deterministic and makes shit up) isn't actually saving you any effort.
pluc 2y ago
AI is just doing what SEO people have been doing for decades, inflating results that have no business being there. At least now there's no pretention of having any skills.
pixelsort 2y ago
Of course OpenAI can't stuff their UI with ads yet. In the middle of escalating anti-AI sentiment due to the rapid slopification of the infosphere that they intiated? With cultural resentment growing over the devaluation of visual evidence? With video and audio modalities creating distrust and obsolescence in the creative class? Google only had to provide superior value with a clean UI. OpenAI has to contend with normalizing the mechanisms that are upsetting the lives of the customer base that pays them; the customers they'll replace with ad servers as soon as it becomes prudent to start indicating their end-game.
bfrog 2y ago
Google in 2000s was excellent. Modern Google makes me feel like I’m a product being sold a lemon at a barb wire fenced used car lot. It’s horrible, the things being shown are horrible, and there’s questionable ethics and value to be had by even going there.
potsandpans 2y ago
Just sharing an anecdote: I was searching for a quote that I'd heard in an audiobook the other day. I just had the general paraphrase, and didn't feel like scanning through the chapters to go find it. This was a somewhat obscure source. Google had just straight garbage for me. The quote was political in nature, and I felt like the results were fighting general tone-policing filters and were tuned for recent events. o1 on the other hand, found the author of the quote, summarized the general idea of what i might be searching for and then cited potential sources. It's just patently obvious to me that google has failed in delivering the core value prop of their product, they're begging to be replaced.
- 1980phipsi 2y ago
  I couldn’t remember the phrase “oral history” and Google was terrible at figuring out what I wanted to search for, but ChatGpt got it for me after a few back and forths.
- morkalork 2y ago
  That's where I'm at too, I wanted to find the origin a quote and couldn't remember the exact words. Google was just pulling up random shit related to the words in the query and nothing related to the quote itself. ChatGPT figured it out in a minute. Same goes for looking stuff up in books, just ask what chapter something happens in.
- geertj 2y ago
  Piling on, but I wanted to find a song I had once heard when I was a kid. I did not know the exact lyrics, just that it was woman talking about her husband leaving for space. I had tried to find the song using regular search engines multiple times over the years. Eerily (a little over a year ago, using GPT3.5), I was able to find the song within about 15 minutes of prompting with various pieces of information including tone, topic, and rough year I heard the song. (The song was "Clouds across the moon" from the Rah band.)
- imperialdrive 2y ago
  I had a similar experience last week. Searched and searched for a blurb from Middlemarch, without luck. o1 returned exactly what I was hoping for in one fell swoop.
bambax 2y ago
> Does ChatGPT Search have trust? Open AI isn't monetizing its search just yet, but AI has its own issues with hallucinations. Everywhere where SEO people congregate, they talk only about this: how to produce content that will eventually end up in training data for LLMs, so that when you ask about anything remotely connected to a given brand, its products will show up in the response. Ads are bad enough today, but it's possible the future will be worse: product placement in everything, everywhere, all of the time.
- falcor84 2y ago
  This reminds me of that awesome analysis of all the speech of a diplomat's visit in Asimov's original Foundation book: > Hardin threw himself back in the chair. “You know, that's the most interesting part of the whole business. I admit that I thought his Lordship a most consummate donkey when I first met him – but it turned out that he is an accomplished diplomat and a most clever man. I took the liberty of recording all his statements.” >... When Houk, after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications—in short all the goo and dribble—he found he had nothing left. Everything canceled out. Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn't say one damned thing, and said it so that you never noticed. I'm pretty sure that we're now at the level of AI where it's possibly to fully automate such an analysis, such that even if the original content is entirely corrupted by product placement, the AI could cut it out to leave only the valuable information, if any remains. The only question is whether the AI will be on the user's side or the advertiser's side.
  - bambax 2y ago
    What will happen is that when you ask the AI to summarize a book to remove the fluff, it will inject random mentions of how the main character decided to drink a Coke. Let's go with truly open models! you say. That way we can be sure there are no shoddy behind-the-scenes deal going on between the model provider and some company or government. But the ads are in the training data, they are part of the fabric of the world. You can't get rid of them except if you do the training yourself, which is a huge amount of work, and maybe impossible (because model providers escape copyright laws, and you can't).
randall 2y ago
i’ll buy this. seems reasonable.
thrance 2y ago
There is no cure to the endless stream of AI generated SEO-trash. As long as there is a system to game and an incentive to do so, it will be gamed. The only solution I can dream of is to remove the incentive, aka remove advertising. I'm afraid I'll be dead long before that.
mrtksn 2y ago
In 2000s we were freeloading on the investors expense, in 2020's investors are recouping their investments. Also, most of the content was either stolen(divx, mp3 etc) or created without of expectation of immediate reward(mostly passion projects). Oh and btw, Google didn't got infested after LLMs proliferation. Google results were useless way before that. With LLMs there's even improvement as the spam is at least mediocre content.
epanchin 2y ago
I'm happy to pay for ChatGPT, and I would happily pay for a clean Google search experience without ads. How much are they making per visitor a month?
- CubsFan1060 2y ago
  Have you looked into Kagi? I'm very happy with it.
effdee 2y ago
So... the next step clearly is ChatGPT adding Ads to its output.
AJRF 2y ago
The example he shows here has the answer to his question highlighted in the AI overview, and in huge text in the InfoBox. He got his answer instantly without having to go to another page. Really wish such bold claims had better evidence.
- gundmc 2y ago
  Agreed, I actually prefer the Google page in the example screenshots. And in my experience Google still returns much much faster than GPT Search. I'm open to the suggestion that OpenAI can disrupt Google, but this was a weird case to highlight.
BiteCode_dev 2y ago
Once timeless facts will be solidified in AI training, like historical dates, laws of physics, maths formulas or specific programming API, there will be no reason to search for these things using Google. The web battle will then happen on this moving quickly, like the news. This will give immensely more power to the medias, and I fear that a lot given they have demonstrated time and again they can't be trusted with it.
- firebaze 2y ago
  They lost way too much trust across the board the last years, culminating in the Biden/Harris/Trump debacle. Youtube/Instagram Reels/Tiktok is the (sad) future. "Classical" media is a zombie. Google is deader than dead on the search front. But I think they'll go the IBM route, albeit more successful
- sumedh 2y ago
  > Once timeless facts will be solidified in AI training Who decides those are facts? What if someone comes up with alternative facts?
  - BiteCode_dev 2y ago
    I don't think you'll find a lot of people fighting about newtons gravity equations, the year of the French revolution or the fundamentals about steam engines.
k__ 2y ago
Brave Search might be a good alternative. It's index is created by people surfing with the Brave browser, so only websites used by real people are included.
nottorp 2y ago
Why OpenAI in particular? I mean, Gemini is much better than the "traditional" google search as well. Anything is better than 2024 google search actually.
dagmx 2y ago
A lot of folks are focusing on the AI answers that Google gives, but for me the real downgrade has been the change in their algorithm a few years ago where it tries to search for what it thinks I mean instead of what I search for. Even putting entire chunks of text in quotes isn’t enough anymore. I can never get Google to search for what I want without trying to engineer a prompt, when it could at some point. In trying to become more helpful, it’s become worse.
- cma 2y ago
  Especially for programming identifiers. You put in some really tech sounding camel case identifier and it tries to split it out and match straight to celebrity trash scraped from Taboola.
einpoklum 2y ago
> OpenAI's search is becoming Google in the 2000s Google started going bad in the 2000s (albeit not as bad as now). > if it can remain trustworthy. At no point was it trustworthy - even if it were an abstract LLM, trust would be an issue; but this is the opaque product of a corporation heavily invested in by untrustworthy entities and people. That does not mean it isn't often useful, but "trust" and "usefulness" are two very different things.
karaterobot 2y ago
What is the current status of SEO weasels trying to poison AI data by stuffing it with spam?
- AlexandrB 2y ago
  What do you think is the endgame of AI monetization other than marketing/spam in the AI output? Whether the SEO weasels get there before OpenAI themselves is largely irrelevant.
deadbabe 2y ago
Will OpenAI eventually deliver ads along with responses? “Before getting a response, a word from our sponsors:” type thing?
georgeplusplus 2y ago
I think I’ve had such a bad experience with openAIs charGPT answering a question falsely and sounding very convincing that I skip the AI overview or double check to confirm it’s correct. Am I mad?
- throwawa14223 2y ago
  In my experience that's not limited to chatGPT, all of the LLM tools seem worthless to me.
- nixosbestos 2y ago
  I already regularly am helping someone with something, they'll Google it at the same time as me and they'll authoritatively regurgitate the AI summary. More often than not, it's been misleading, or a partial answer to the point of being detrimental. I get it though. I sort of am the news guy of my family and they constantly ask me where I go for news. It's an impossible answer. I grew up with the internet in it's early days, using it for policy debate research. It's a non-precise method of consuming various sources, judging their answers on plausibility and commonalities, and a healthy dose of constant skepticism. But people don't want that. They want the answer spoodfed to them.
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jagtstronaut 2y ago
This. I think Amazon is doing the same thing and leaving the door open for Walmart or another player with some logistical muscle to take a bunch of the market from them. Amazon search used to be so simple. Now you sift through so many ads and hidden ad garbage to find the thing you want to buy.
varelse 2y ago
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WalterBright 2y ago
> I don't want to watch a 10-minute video for a quick answer Nailed it. Google should show the transcript.
plagiarist 2y ago
This is correct. A ton of the hype about LLMs is you can type in a question and get a direct answer without needing to struggle through listicles. Phenomenal compared to the trash a search result provides. Is is ironic that LLMs are the source of much of the garbage in search results. Good business model to produce unbearable noise and the filter that recovers some signal, I guess.
heironimus 2y ago
I was using ChatGPT to compare Docker and Podman and getting reasonable comparisons. I also asked it about c code searching tools and getting a reasonable list with what I think were reasonable comparisons. It hit me that in a few years, this may not be available as Docker and other tool suppliers start paying for advertising. We’ll see.
manbash 2y ago
I wouldn't be concerned about trusting the results of ChatGPT if it also were providing links to the sources it had cited or used as a reference in its answers. Unfortunately, it doesn't, and so I can't verify them. Not sure if it's an actual limitation of current LLM or rather they're intentionally filtering out the sources.
- jclulow 2y ago
  If the system was willing to link to the sources from which it obtained particular information, it would be too easy to hold them accountable for having stolen a bunch of content from people who didn't opt in!
- pton_xd 2y ago
  > I wouldn't be concerned about trusting the results of ChatGPT if it also were providing links to the sources it had cited or used as a reference in its answers. This will only be a problem for a few more years. Soon every article, paper, and website will be generated by a LLM. Verifying the output of ChatGPT by referencing other LLM generated source material will be a pointless exercise.
- sumedh 2y ago
  > Unfortunately, it doesn't, and so I can't verify them. Try asking for sources, whenever I have asked, it gives them.
Beijinger 2y ago
This! "I don't want to watch a 10-minute video for a quick answer." And this: "OpenAI's search is becoming Google in the 2000s, if it can remain trustworthy." The problem I see: People use OpenAI/Perplexity for knowledge. Not to seek website. I think sooner or later, most website will block AI crawlers. What does a website gets out of it?
- jayd16 2y ago
  I'm still waiting for the AI service that turns those 10 minute videos into a text tutorial with photos. I think it's pretty damning that it's not a built in YouTube feature by now.
  - Beijinger 2y ago
    https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtubedigest-summarize-a/agjkjablkiapmpbeglmdcmhnihlofija?hl=en-US https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtubedigest-summa...
  - award_ 2y ago
    Lots of limitations here but they do offer an 'ask' button under some circumstances: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14110396?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14110396?hl=en I've found it to be helpful in getting quicker information out of some 'review' style videos, where I can ask a few pointed questions and get answers faster than the narrator can get to that info. I hadn't found it to be wrong in my few attempts with it, but ymmv
  - GeoAtreides 2y ago
    let's go kantian and imagine everyone would use such a service why would someone create a 10 minute video if no one would watch it and they would get no money for it?
    - jayd16 2y ago
      I assume some folks prefer the videos but if not, then why are they getting made? The creator can use the tool themselves and post it with ads. In fact, I'd prefer it.
baxtr 2y ago
Today I had a better experience with Google than with ChatGPT. I started with chat and asked why I couldn’t change the passcode on a kid's device. I tried 3 answers. None worked. So I google. First hit is an Apple forum with the exact problem. Solved.
- sumedh 2y ago
  What was the Apple forum's answer and what was ChatGpt's answer?
xbmcuser 2y ago
I don't think it will be as easy to supplant google search as it was in the past with Yahoo and Alta Vista. In the past internet search was just starting we were all used to trying different search engine and the results were different enough with all the different ways of indexing and searching that moving from 1 to another made a difference. Most of the people using the internet were a bit of pioneers navigating through something brand new and unique. Today majority of the internet users ie 10-32 years old or 60%+ of the internet users grew up with using Google and how to get best answers our of it. Chat gpt might bring in some churn but as long google is close enough it won't get replaced easily.
jerf 2y ago
Don't bet on AI staying clean. A lot of HN readers conceptualize the forces attacking the integrity of the search results as just some isolated people taking occasional potshots, and then maybe slinking away if their trick gets blocked. It is probably a lot more accurate to visualize the SEO industry as a Dark Google. Roughly as well resourced, with many smart people working on it full time, day in, day out, with information sharing and coordination. It isn't literally one company, but this conception is probably a lot closer then the one in the heads of most people reading this. Dark Google is motivated, resourced, and smart. And then, once I started thinking of it that way for this post, I realized that increasingly.... Google is increasingly at beck and call of Dark Google. They're increasingly the real customers of Google and the real source of money. It's why Google just seems to be getting worse and worse for us... it's because we're not the real customers any more. Dark Google rules. And if Dark Google has not yet figured out how to scam AI... it is only a matter of time. Dark Google is where Google gets its money now. When Dark Google turns its attention to AI fully, OpenAI will be no more able to resist its economic incentives than Google did. Can't wait for the first screenshot of someone searching for the impact of the battle of Gettysburg on the civil war and seeing the AI do its subtle best to slide an add for Coca Cola into it in some semantically bizarre manner.
- m463 2y ago
  Google isn't a search company, it is an identification company. that is its moat.
- _false 2y ago
  I like the Dark Google metaphor, but SEO agencies being Google's real customers makes no sense to me.
  - jonplackett 2y ago
    Yeah I also didn’t get this. Can you explain what you meant?
  - flpm 2y ago
    I think it's more a symbiotic relationship, they feed on each other and both benefit at the expense of the users
rlpb 2y ago
Infestation also applies to actual "organic" results. The old Google philosophy would have ranked pages with annoying pop-ups, paywalls, sign-in walls etc out of existence. Today's Google does not. They even tolerate sites that show them articles to index but are then hidden from the general public behind a paywall. The old Internet still exists, but Google's ranking behaviour hides it.
webspinner 2y ago
Google has put it's early 2000s history where it can't find it! In the garbage most likely, but somewhere deeper.
Timber-6539 2y ago
This article woefully assumes OpenAI has had the same R&D that Google has had as a search business.
paul7986 2y ago
Trying to replace Google w/GPT but.... - Local search results for businesses, phone #s, directions isnt available - Im paying GPT subscriber and it constantly logs me out on my different devices - Sora I can not upload photos of whoever & make them do whatever like https://hailuoai.video/ https://hailuoai.video/ which is free and at times fairly convincing (fun for the 12 yr old in you lol). I know GPT Search is new and Im excited for GPT to become a phone AI OS or Open AI & MIcrosoft developed their own phone with a new personal device paradigm... i.e. create a H.E.R. phone.. it's your personal AI Assistant that does all for you via text, voice, hand gestures, facial expressions, etc. Once you pick up your phone you see your assistant waiting to assist. You can skin your AI assistant to look like anyone living or dead (loved one could live on & help your throughout ur day). Probably some crazy ideas but a H.E.R. phone / personal device as described (some parts) would be something new/different and possibly give Apple and Android a run for their money!
summerlight 2y ago
Google seriously needs to scale up their generative models to all of crawling/indexing/ranking infrastructure. Their current ranking models are not capable of dealing with the next-gen web filled with 99% gen AI craps. I think they also know this. The problem is the cost and they're hyper-focused on bringing it down, but it is not fast enough.
_zagj 2y ago
> When Google came onto the scene, I credit its success to the tried and true paradigm that makes companies successful: simple and easy to use. > Yahoo was dominant back then, and it tried to put everyone and everything in front of you. Then we learned about the paralysis of choice. Too many choices, the mental fatigue weighed in, and the product became difficult to use. This nonsense again? I was around then, and I switched from Yahoo and AltaVista to Google despite its dumb name and stupid, childish logo because Google's results were hands-down better. Instead of a solely full-text search paradigm based only on keyword density, Google also ranked pages based on how many other pages linked to them, the so-called "PageRank" algorithm. This worked much, much better, and was much harder (for a while) to game. Before Google, it was common when searching to find pages that gamed the search engines by stuffing their <meta> keyword tags with SEO crap or putting it in giant footer sections in a tiny font the same color as the background (to render it invisible). Google's PageRank wasn't fooled by this. Also most of the major search engines adopted similarly minimalist UIs, and it did zero to stop the bleeding. They all lost to google. (AltaVista, the pre-Google Google, was still useful for a while for some specialty searching, like for anonymous FTP servers, and I wonder if DEC had never gone under or if Compaq had spun off AltaVista, maybe history would be different.) EDIT: I just realized the article doesn't even mention AltaVista. Unbelievable.
lakomen 2y ago
yeah Google Search is awful and there's still nothing better. What's new?
healsdata 2y ago
I'll be honest, I don't understand the example in this article -- it doesn't seem to be evidence of the thesis/complaint. The two dark mode screenshots are basically the same and, at a glance, I trust the Google one more because it's showing me a snippet of the authoritative source, Apple.com. Beyond that, there's no ads in the Google screenshot, which was a huge part of the thesis statement.
BogdanPetre 2y ago
Agree on the idea, however I think Perplexity is a better product than Open AI in search
aleph_minus_one 2y ago
> And even these ads weren't that bad. What made Google successful was showing ads you wanted to see. I'm searching for a bottle of wine, and ads for bottles of wine were shown to me. Even at that time, Google hardly ever showed me ads that I wanted to see (even though in former days, Google's ads were less intrusive than they are today): as I sometimes mention on Hacker News, most advertising networks have difficulties to "pigeon-hole" me into interest groups - many interests of me are somewhat niche. For example many Google searches that I do are about scientific topics from my areas of expertise - this is a rather hard topic for advertisisers (though it is plausible that it might be a lucrative topic for anybody who is capable to monetize on people like me). On the other hand, if (rather accidentally ;-) ) Google's advertising/interesting sorting algorithm actually "finds" some interest of me which can be "monetized" via ads that try to sell me something, it's the common case that I have already bought such a product recently - in such a situation I clearly don't need another piece of the product. The reason for this is simple: after I bought the product, I have to understand some of the product's "complicated convoluted details", so a lot of Google search queries are of the type "[product name] [potential problem that I have with the product]". Thus, I do a lot more Google search queries for the product after I bought it. It should be obvious that for the ad to pay off for the advertisier, it should be shown before I buy the product - thus Google has to be capable of interpreting the quite weak signals that might show that in the future I might want to buy such a product, and not the strong signals that Google sees in the weeks after my purchase.
kelsolaar 2y ago
I have been using Perplexity 95% of the time this past year.
a-dub 2y ago
google's playbook from the 2000s was to run a search engine based on a novel ranking algorithm that actually worked with a ui designed by engineers who like things fast, simple and minimal. the rest of the process described herein has been best described by cory doctorow as "enshitification."
JKCalhoun 2y ago
I may be overly cynical, may live in the rarified bubble of the tech-savvy, but I think Google as it has existed is already dead and doesn't yet know it. Their search results have been less than useless to me for some years now. And then LLM's came along and have been my go-to for all queries.
marginalia_nu 2y ago
> When Google came onto the scene, I credit its success to the tried and true paradigm that makes companies successful: simple and easy to use. If Google's competitive advantage was only that they had a clean and simple web page, I don't think they'd have nearly the sticking power they ended up having. You can design a front-end that looks like Google's original UI in a matter of hours. It seems implausible tale that in the 25 years since their ascendance, nobody has tried to compete with them with a simple-looking search box. Google became dominant because Google was much better than the alternatives.
alfor 2y ago
Google became an asset of the government. By selecting what you see they control what you think, what you buy who you vote for, similar to legacy media. Open AI has started on day one with that goal.
- squiggleblaz 2y ago
  This conspiracy theory is broken, because governments around the world have been struggling more than previously to get reelected. It might be that Google has been used to "select what you see so they control what you think, what you buy who you vote for, similar to legacy media", but they're not doing so under the control of government.
  - alfor 2y ago
    This was proven in the Twitter files. The same was happening in Facebook and Google. There also independant research that prove this. hard to Google ;) Basicaly it's proven that just switching the autocomplete when you search Trump or Kamala can sway the votes of undecided by huge margin. The seek those and switch the suggestion were it matter. They also incite people to go vote depending on the choice and buch of other dirty tricks. You are right that it no longer work. In the end truth will always win because it connect to reality. Having just X switching to truth will swarm the world.
    - alfor 2y ago
      watch this is you are still unaware of the totalitarian machine. https://youtu.be/ye8MOfxD5nU https://youtu.be/ye8MOfxD5nU
lamuswawir 2y ago
Google's results from the AIStudio are really good results. Everything there is good. Probably because the studio has better models than are currently being used for general search.
firecall 2y ago
I honestly don't mind the current Google Search Results page design and additional features. For me, it's the web in general that isn't the same. Google Search is probably just as good, but I have an idea that the content to be indexed isn't what it was. Has the world changed, or have I changed? Probably both. The WWW of content isn't the same, and i don't search for the same things anymore. My use of search has become integrated in my patterns in the physical world. I need to know what products are in stock, where things are, when a restaurant is open and so on. For those searches, Google is generally excellent I find. Also, I actually find Google's AI Answers to be pretty decent. Even if I do ethically disagree with denying the original content authors those page views.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
All I see on Google for most searches is ads and SEO spam that gets the ranking and clicks. It’s only once I spend time scrolling it that I realize it has the telltale signs like very lengthy text that doesn’t answer the title succinctly.
aprilfoo 2y ago
Investors value OpenAI more than $150bn, but it just reported $5bn loss on $3.7bn revenue: the financial pressure is tremendous and that cannot last long. It's the same kind of situation as with Google vs. Yahoo in the early days, when the clean interface without much ads was a very strong USP.
djaouen 2y ago
I actually think this might push me towards using ChatGPT more. I just hate having to type, "What version was the iPhone in 2016?" rather than "iphone 2016 version number" lol
kittikitti 2y ago
OpenAI trains on sources like BusinessInsider which allow sponsored content for a price. This is how they will monetize their products, by intentionally introducing it to bias for a profit motive. It's a good thing they convinced you that its a black box, otherwise you would see this coming.
reynaldi 2y ago
In addition to the ChatGPT’s search, the advanced voice model also supports web search, making it even easier to search.
strogonoff 2y ago
I am working with a new for me tech, and got stuck integrating an SDK from a hardware manufacturer into my runtime. The SDK is in C, and my runtime isn’t. A friend suggested to use his LLM wrangling skills to get the SDK adapted. The results were interesting, but we wasted a day or two on trying to make it actually work and failed. Then it turned out I can call C code from within my runtime, which the LLM did not point out. I figured out the specifics with a bit of googling and successfully managed to call C functions. Yet there were still issues in parsing the data, now in C SDK itself; the friend used different LLMs to refactor and comment C code, but they did a bad job with missing implementations and a lot of general obvious comments (an empty deinitialization function with “clean up as needed” comment and so on). Then it turned out there was an SDK for my runtime. I just did not search enough. Of course, the LLM would not say that. The LLM would just obediently try to do what it’s asked to do and never question why.
xorvoid 2y ago
Between Kagi for ordinary web search and Claude for “complicated questions I don’t know how to phrase for a search engine”, I’m pretty happy right now. Great job to both organizations!
adxl 2y ago
In 1999 I worked at Yahoo! It was great the stock was flying, I worked on really cool tech writing C++ code. Then one day I went to a social dinner and a high schooler got up and made a speech and at one point said “I googled it”. Right then and there I know the gig was up. So far I have not heard anyone say I GPT’d it, but Google is running very dangerously close to the edge here. For one thing the founders have checked out, never a good sign. Something that also bugs people is GOOG wants to follow you everywhere, when you sign in to many websites that little blurb asking for your google account comes from a google server (<script src="https://accounts.google.com/gsi/client https://accounts.google.com/gsi/client" async defer>). I was responsible for servers that ran 100m page views a day at Yahoo! One day I was approached by this smarmy little guy who asked if he could pull logs from the machines. Alarm bells. Who the heck was this and what was he doing with the logs. I knew of course he worked for Filo and so I had to give over the data. This was the start of the spying on the customers. Google is a master of this, and it really irks a lot of their customers. Another red flag. Alternates like duck duck go and brave have made some inroads. Their percentages are quite low still. There have been layoffs in the name of cost cutting. Googlers have had some very public employee dissatisfaction meetings (my name for them). Employee compensation problems, problems with businesses the company is etc. One last thing, Mark Cuban sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion April 1, 1999 (seriously!). “ Apollo Global Management acquired a 90% stake in Verizon Media, which included Yahoo and AOL, for $5 billion. Verizon retained a 10% stake in the new company, which was rebranded as Yahoo upon the deal's completion.” The deal was finalized Sept 1, 2021 according to chatGPT.
- johny115 2y ago
  I say ChatGPTed it almost every day, or some form of it, OpenAI dropped ball on the name. Me and me friends say "asked CHatGPT, asked GPT, asked AI (but mean ChatGPT)" ... it hurts though as it's all too long and akward, no intuitive verb to use. Probably just my limited perspective, but I am also noticing, it's vastly men who use ChatGPT daily on anything from random questions, to health queries or personal growth. Not sure why, but somehow, I don't know a single female who would use it much, beyond super basic queries. Meanwhile guys of all kinds of backgrounds, nerds or not, technical or not, young or old, doesn't matter ... if there is a heavy user, it's a guy. But as I say, just limited perspective, I don't know big enough number of people for substantial sample size. Just recently I see the stark contrasts more and more, even very smart, nerdy and highly curious women I know, are not interested in ChatGPT.
herdcall 2y ago
Also check out Grok, it's surprisingly good, especially at organizing the results to get the job done for you. You can access it as part of X.
KTibow 2y ago
I'm surprised nobody (in the comments I scrolled by) has brought up the Web option (which only shows links) yet

470 points by chuckwnelson 2y ago

> Google is losing trust with all these buzzing results, and its answer is to throw more jam at the wall to see what sticks. But this just attracts more flies. If you're going to work the metaphor, work the metaphor!

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animanoir 2y ago

Still using Google I see? How primitive..

hammock 2y ago
What do you use?
- animanoir 2y ago
  Kagi.

RF_Savage 2y ago

The Yahooification of Googles search becomes more amusing when one considers that it is now led buy the dude who ran Yahoo search to the ground.

BadHumans 2y ago
Not anymore. Prabhakar was promoted from Head of Search to Chief Technologist whatever that means.
lelandfe 2y ago
Prabhakar Raghavan was recently "promoted" out of that: https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/
Der_Einzige 2y ago
Given how Vivek and Elon kicked the hornets nest about this, I wonder if there will be blow-back at Yahoo. A lot of people don't realize that Yahoo basically only survives today off the back of H1b labor.
- smt88 2y ago
  Every large tech company only survives because of H1b labor.

fratlas 2y ago

People want to spend less time on a task. Whichever tool succeeds at this will win.

m0llusk 2y ago
Time on task only matters for the lowest paid. At high levels robust, predictable, and other characteristics compete strongly for value. Do you want the most accurate medical diagnosis or the fastest?
- jeffbee 2y ago
  Is that your typical search engine use case or are you more likely trying to find out when the taco stand opens?
  - openrisk 2y ago
    There is no "typical" search engine use case. The fallacy that there is such a thing is a big part of the problem. The enshittification and decline of the digital window to the internet is so complete that even basic information management tools like browser bookmarks are deprecated: people will "search" even for sites they use repeatedly. Minimally there needs to be a transparent split between commercial queries (searching to buy something) and knowledge / abstract queries (searching to learn something). Users should be context aware (ideally using completely separate tools) of when they are simply accessing a pay-to-play online product catalog versus when they are querying what is effectively a decentralized wikipedia. Commingling the commercial with the factual was always going to be a dead-end.
  - pessimizer 2y ago
    So you want the answer to when the taco stand opens to be quick and wrong? That's possibly the biggest waste of my time you could think of, because I'm probably going to have to spend a half-hour and a trip out of the house finding out that the answer was wrong. I'd rather get the answer in 5 minutes and for it to always be right. Dying in an accident coming back from a taco stand AI didn't know closed 6 months ago would be the worst death.

CM30 2y ago

The question of course is how well that level of quality will hold up now that more and more of the internet is AI generated, and said AI generated content is being sourced for said AI tools. It feels like our choices are either to only get information from a certain time period or earlier, or to accept the information provided by Open AI and co is only going to get worse and worse over time...

omolobo 2y ago

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binkHN 2y ago

> Enter 2024 with AI. The top 20% of search results are a wall of text from AI... I'll be the contrarian here and say I actually like Google's AI Overview? For the first time in a long time, I can search for an answer to a question and, instead of getting annoying ads and SEO-optimized uselessness, I actually get an answer. Google is finally useful again. That said, once Google screws with this and starts making search challenging again, as it has been for years, I'll go elsewhere.

lm28469 2y ago
> I can search for an answer to a question and, instead of getting annoying ads and SEO-optimized uselessness, I actually get an answer. You get the average of the seo optimized answers
pishpash 2y ago
It's wrong enough and unsourced enough that it's more cognitive load to vet the result than not having it. Google is barely more useful because of this.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
m_ke 2y ago
It would be great if it wasn't completely wrong 50% of the time.
- jsheard 2y ago
  The mark of a great product/feature is always when they feel the need to force it on users, because they know that a significant portion of users would switch it off if they could.
- binkHN 2y ago
  I find it mostly right 70% of the time.

m_ke 2y ago

SEO ruined the web, guided by Google's ranking algorithm. Things will get even worse as scammy companies start flooding the web with LLM generated content pushing their products to bias LLMs to increase the probability of outputing their name for keywords related to their business.

wwweston 2y ago
Libraries and librarians are starting to seem very relevant again. As are journalistic institutions.
- giraffe_lady 2y ago
  What a relief then that those are all healthy, well-supported organizations with bright futures. It's not a coincidence that the solution to this problem is exactly the organizations that are being systematically undermined and dismantled.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    They aren't being undermined and dismantled, they're dying of the same cancer search is, and one they contracted voluntarily: advertising.
    - giraffe_lady 2y ago
      Libraries are?
      - TeMPOraL 2y ago
        I meant journalistic institutions. Libraries themselves are a special thing - they've been invented before intellectual property was a thing, and have been attacked by IP proponents ever since. In this way, they're very much like LLMs, and many of the arguments against LLMs trained on copyrighted material apply just as much to public libraries. Oh the irony.

KaiserPro 2y ago

chatGPT offers bullshit answers faster, and more confidently. However the issue for openAI is the cost of business is _horrifically_ expensive. Sure they charge some users for premium access, but they aren't currently enough to cover costs. openAI needs a step change in performance, and that meta doesn't release an open-source version of it and a step change in compute efficiency.

jeffbee 2y ago
Is it faster? I just did similar queries to the ones in the article and ChatGPT (web) spent a long time with an animated "Searching the web" placeholder, then served an error.
- KaiserPro 2y ago
  for searching the web, probably not. For the "whats the difference between tiffin and rocky road" its probably much quicker. However if you want to get _more_ information, or assess if thats bollocks or not, its much slower and click-ier
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  jeffbee - this is an unrelated comment because I need to follow up with you on a comment you made (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41873615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41873615) a couple of months ago. Could you reach out via email to paul@linuxaudiosystems.com ? Thanks. I'll delete this comment in 24 hrs.

eastbound 2y ago

So, as a company, when can I pay OpenAI to twist its responses towards my company? Because it will happen. I’m afraid that ChatGPT is my friend for 20€ today, but prices will increase and response quality will go the way of Siri.

sumedh 2y ago
> when can I pay OpenAI to twist its responses towards my company? They are probably thinking about it. ChatGpt will become one of the most valuable company if they can pull it off and still keep the users happy.

h_tbob 2y ago

I for one love the “wall of ai” this author decries. It is super helpful for most of the questions I ask. I don’t know why he doesn’t like it.

deleted 2y ago
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zknowledge 2y ago

Definitely agree, but I'm surprised Perplexity wasn't mentioned in this post. It's currently Perplexity Vs. Google

Deegy 2y ago
Once chatGPT and Claude (through MCP) added web search functionality I completely dropped Perplexity. I assume I'm not unique in this regard. Feels like the writing is on the wall for Perplexity.
- weberer 2y ago
  Could you explain more? Are the results better, or are there other features?
  - neonbrain 2y ago
    I assume he's just being over dramatic. I use Perplexity every day, multiple times per day, and it almost completely replaced Google for me in such areas as coding or technological research. Also, I never used nor planning to use ChatGPT or Claude (I use private open models instead - Mistral Nemo, Qwen, etc.). But I also feel like "I'm not unique in this regard", lol.
  - Deegy 2y ago
    It's mostly a decision to manage the total amount I spend on LLM tools. Given unlimited money I suppose I'd still be subscribed to Perplexity because the UI is slightly better than Claude and chatGPT for web results. But Claude and chatGPT are plenty enough for my web use cases while allowing me full access to all of their models for non web search use cases.
- hombre_fatal 2y ago
  Yeah, I keep using the $1/mo promotions for Perplexity but I only really use it because it can read the results to me which I use for practicing foreign languages, so there's that.
2y ago

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msoad 2y ago

I remember when the more tech savvy folks were migrating from Altavista and Yahoo to Google because they understood it is better sooner than others. The same thing is happening. I consider myself tech savvy (still!) and I have to admit that I rarely use Google for all sort of information. As a side note: I am using Safari and I noticed that Apple's search is also replacing my Google searches. In the past if I knew name of a company or organization but not their website I'd Google it. Now I put it in the address bar and Safari very often finds the website for me.

wwweston 2y ago
Of course the savvy are using LLMs now, but they’re also reckoning with two things: * you have to check an LLM result, especially if it cites something (because it may or may not exist) * you can’t cite an LLM result It’s a useful tool, but it lacks certain utility features that a useful web + effective search has. Or had.
- maximus_01 2y ago
  100%. But gradually being solved as source links are being provided. If the source link is as good as what you’d find on Google anyway then you have a way better search experience and don’t really burn much extra time checking the LLM work
- weberer 2y ago
  Even without using LLMs, Duckduckgo is good at providing little widgets that just give you a straight answer. Try searching "150 usd to eur" or "Weather Philadelphia".
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  > Of course the savvy are using LLMs now I don't think this is true at all. It is people prone to hype, or who are naive, who are using LLMs. The savvy know that a tool which you have to verify every single time (because it isn't deterministic and makes shit up) isn't actually saving you any effort.

pluc 2y ago

AI is just doing what SEO people have been doing for decades, inflating results that have no business being there. At least now there's no pretention of having any skills.

pixelsort 2y ago

Of course OpenAI can't stuff their UI with ads yet. In the middle of escalating anti-AI sentiment due to the rapid slopification of the infosphere that they intiated? With cultural resentment growing over the devaluation of visual evidence? With video and audio modalities creating distrust and obsolescence in the creative class? Google only had to provide superior value with a clean UI. OpenAI has to contend with normalizing the mechanisms that are upsetting the lives of the customer base that pays them; the customers they'll replace with ad servers as soon as it becomes prudent to start indicating their end-game.

bfrog 2y ago

Google in 2000s was excellent. Modern Google makes me feel like I’m a product being sold a lemon at a barb wire fenced used car lot. It’s horrible, the things being shown are horrible, and there’s questionable ethics and value to be had by even going there.

potsandpans 2y ago

Just sharing an anecdote: I was searching for a quote that I'd heard in an audiobook the other day. I just had the general paraphrase, and didn't feel like scanning through the chapters to go find it. This was a somewhat obscure source. Google had just straight garbage for me. The quote was political in nature, and I felt like the results were fighting general tone-policing filters and were tuned for recent events. o1 on the other hand, found the author of the quote, summarized the general idea of what i might be searching for and then cited potential sources. It's just patently obvious to me that google has failed in delivering the core value prop of their product, they're begging to be replaced.

1980phipsi 2y ago
I couldn’t remember the phrase “oral history” and Google was terrible at figuring out what I wanted to search for, but ChatGpt got it for me after a few back and forths.
morkalork 2y ago
That's where I'm at too, I wanted to find the origin a quote and couldn't remember the exact words. Google was just pulling up random shit related to the words in the query and nothing related to the quote itself. ChatGPT figured it out in a minute. Same goes for looking stuff up in books, just ask what chapter something happens in.
geertj 2y ago
Piling on, but I wanted to find a song I had once heard when I was a kid. I did not know the exact lyrics, just that it was woman talking about her husband leaving for space. I had tried to find the song using regular search engines multiple times over the years. Eerily (a little over a year ago, using GPT3.5), I was able to find the song within about 15 minutes of prompting with various pieces of information including tone, topic, and rough year I heard the song. (The song was "Clouds across the moon" from the Rah band.)
imperialdrive 2y ago
I had a similar experience last week. Searched and searched for a blurb from Middlemarch, without luck. o1 returned exactly what I was hoping for in one fell swoop.

bambax 2y ago

> Does ChatGPT Search have trust? Open AI isn't monetizing its search just yet, but AI has its own issues with hallucinations. Everywhere where SEO people congregate, they talk only about this: how to produce content that will eventually end up in training data for LLMs, so that when you ask about anything remotely connected to a given brand, its products will show up in the response. Ads are bad enough today, but it's possible the future will be worse: product placement in everything, everywhere, all of the time.

falcor84 2y ago
This reminds me of that awesome analysis of all the speech of a diplomat's visit in Asimov's original Foundation book: > Hardin threw himself back in the chair. “You know, that's the most interesting part of the whole business. I admit that I thought his Lordship a most consummate donkey when I first met him – but it turned out that he is an accomplished diplomat and a most clever man. I took the liberty of recording all his statements.” >... When Houk, after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications—in short all the goo and dribble—he found he had nothing left. Everything canceled out. Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn't say one damned thing, and said it so that you never noticed. I'm pretty sure that we're now at the level of AI where it's possibly to fully automate such an analysis, such that even if the original content is entirely corrupted by product placement, the AI could cut it out to leave only the valuable information, if any remains. The only question is whether the AI will be on the user's side or the advertiser's side.
- bambax 2y ago
  What will happen is that when you ask the AI to summarize a book to remove the fluff, it will inject random mentions of how the main character decided to drink a Coke. Let's go with truly open models! you say. That way we can be sure there are no shoddy behind-the-scenes deal going on between the model provider and some company or government. But the ads are in the training data, they are part of the fabric of the world. You can't get rid of them except if you do the training yourself, which is a huge amount of work, and maybe impossible (because model providers escape copyright laws, and you can't).

randall 2y ago

i’ll buy this. seems reasonable.

thrance 2y ago

There is no cure to the endless stream of AI generated SEO-trash. As long as there is a system to game and an incentive to do so, it will be gamed. The only solution I can dream of is to remove the incentive, aka remove advertising. I'm afraid I'll be dead long before that.

mrtksn 2y ago

In 2000s we were freeloading on the investors expense, in 2020's investors are recouping their investments. Also, most of the content was either stolen(divx, mp3 etc) or created without of expectation of immediate reward(mostly passion projects). Oh and btw, Google didn't got infested after LLMs proliferation. Google results were useless way before that. With LLMs there's even improvement as the spam is at least mediocre content.

epanchin 2y ago

I'm happy to pay for ChatGPT, and I would happily pay for a clean Google search experience without ads. How much are they making per visitor a month?

CubsFan1060 2y ago
Have you looked into Kagi? I'm very happy with it.

effdee 2y ago

So... the next step clearly is ChatGPT adding Ads to its output.

AJRF 2y ago

The example he shows here has the answer to his question highlighted in the AI overview, and in huge text in the InfoBox. He got his answer instantly without having to go to another page. Really wish such bold claims had better evidence.

gundmc 2y ago
Agreed, I actually prefer the Google page in the example screenshots. And in my experience Google still returns much much faster than GPT Search. I'm open to the suggestion that OpenAI can disrupt Google, but this was a weird case to highlight.

BiteCode_dev 2y ago

Once timeless facts will be solidified in AI training, like historical dates, laws of physics, maths formulas or specific programming API, there will be no reason to search for these things using Google. The web battle will then happen on this moving quickly, like the news. This will give immensely more power to the medias, and I fear that a lot given they have demonstrated time and again they can't be trusted with it.

firebaze 2y ago
They lost way too much trust across the board the last years, culminating in the Biden/Harris/Trump debacle. Youtube/Instagram Reels/Tiktok is the (sad) future. "Classical" media is a zombie. Google is deader than dead on the search front. But I think they'll go the IBM route, albeit more successful
sumedh 2y ago
> Once timeless facts will be solidified in AI training Who decides those are facts? What if someone comes up with alternative facts?
- BiteCode_dev 2y ago
  I don't think you'll find a lot of people fighting about newtons gravity equations, the year of the French revolution or the fundamentals about steam engines.

k__ 2y ago

Brave Search might be a good alternative. It's index is created by people surfing with the Brave browser, so only websites used by real people are included.

nottorp 2y ago

Why OpenAI in particular? I mean, Gemini is much better than the "traditional" google search as well. Anything is better than 2024 google search actually.

dagmx 2y ago

A lot of folks are focusing on the AI answers that Google gives, but for me the real downgrade has been the change in their algorithm a few years ago where it tries to search for what it thinks I mean instead of what I search for. Even putting entire chunks of text in quotes isn’t enough anymore. I can never get Google to search for what I want without trying to engineer a prompt, when it could at some point. In trying to become more helpful, it’s become worse.

cma 2y ago
Especially for programming identifiers. You put in some really tech sounding camel case identifier and it tries to split it out and match straight to celebrity trash scraped from Taboola.

einpoklum 2y ago

> OpenAI's search is becoming Google in the 2000s Google started going bad in the 2000s (albeit not as bad as now). > if it can remain trustworthy. At no point was it trustworthy - even if it were an abstract LLM, trust would be an issue; but this is the opaque product of a corporation heavily invested in by untrustworthy entities and people. That does not mean it isn't often useful, but "trust" and "usefulness" are two very different things.

karaterobot 2y ago

What is the current status of SEO weasels trying to poison AI data by stuffing it with spam?

AlexandrB 2y ago
What do you think is the endgame of AI monetization other than marketing/spam in the AI output? Whether the SEO weasels get there before OpenAI themselves is largely irrelevant.

deadbabe 2y ago

Will OpenAI eventually deliver ads along with responses? “Before getting a response, a word from our sponsors:” type thing?

georgeplusplus 2y ago

I think I’ve had such a bad experience with openAIs charGPT answering a question falsely and sounding very convincing that I skip the AI overview or double check to confirm it’s correct. Am I mad?

throwawa14223 2y ago
In my experience that's not limited to chatGPT, all of the LLM tools seem worthless to me.
nixosbestos 2y ago
I already regularly am helping someone with something, they'll Google it at the same time as me and they'll authoritatively regurgitate the AI summary. More often than not, it's been misleading, or a partial answer to the point of being detrimental. I get it though. I sort of am the news guy of my family and they constantly ask me where I go for news. It's an impossible answer. I grew up with the internet in it's early days, using it for policy debate research. It's a non-precise method of consuming various sources, judging their answers on plausibility and commonalities, and a healthy dose of constant skepticism. But people don't want that. They want the answer spoodfed to them.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jagtstronaut 2y ago

This. I think Amazon is doing the same thing and leaving the door open for Walmart or another player with some logistical muscle to take a bunch of the market from them. Amazon search used to be so simple. Now you sift through so many ads and hidden ad garbage to find the thing you want to buy.

varelse 2y ago

[dead]

WalterBright 2y ago

> I don't want to watch a 10-minute video for a quick answer Nailed it. Google should show the transcript.

plagiarist 2y ago

This is correct. A ton of the hype about LLMs is you can type in a question and get a direct answer without needing to struggle through listicles. Phenomenal compared to the trash a search result provides. Is is ironic that LLMs are the source of much of the garbage in search results. Good business model to produce unbearable noise and the filter that recovers some signal, I guess.

heironimus 2y ago

I was using ChatGPT to compare Docker and Podman and getting reasonable comparisons. I also asked it about c code searching tools and getting a reasonable list with what I think were reasonable comparisons. It hit me that in a few years, this may not be available as Docker and other tool suppliers start paying for advertising. We’ll see.

manbash 2y ago

I wouldn't be concerned about trusting the results of ChatGPT if it also were providing links to the sources it had cited or used as a reference in its answers. Unfortunately, it doesn't, and so I can't verify them. Not sure if it's an actual limitation of current LLM or rather they're intentionally filtering out the sources.

jclulow 2y ago
If the system was willing to link to the sources from which it obtained particular information, it would be too easy to hold them accountable for having stolen a bunch of content from people who didn't opt in!
pton_xd 2y ago
> I wouldn't be concerned about trusting the results of ChatGPT if it also were providing links to the sources it had cited or used as a reference in its answers. This will only be a problem for a few more years. Soon every article, paper, and website will be generated by a LLM. Verifying the output of ChatGPT by referencing other LLM generated source material will be a pointless exercise.
sumedh 2y ago
> Unfortunately, it doesn't, and so I can't verify them. Try asking for sources, whenever I have asked, it gives them.

Beijinger 2y ago

This! "I don't want to watch a 10-minute video for a quick answer." And this: "OpenAI's search is becoming Google in the 2000s, if it can remain trustworthy." The problem I see: People use OpenAI/Perplexity for knowledge. Not to seek website. I think sooner or later, most website will block AI crawlers. What does a website gets out of it?

jayd16 2y ago
I'm still waiting for the AI service that turns those 10 minute videos into a text tutorial with photos. I think it's pretty damning that it's not a built in YouTube feature by now.
- Beijinger 2y ago
  https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtubedigest-summarize-a/agjkjablkiapmpbeglmdcmhnihlofija?hl=en-US https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtubedigest-summa...
- award_ 2y ago
  Lots of limitations here but they do offer an 'ask' button under some circumstances: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14110396?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14110396?hl=en I've found it to be helpful in getting quicker information out of some 'review' style videos, where I can ask a few pointed questions and get answers faster than the narrator can get to that info. I hadn't found it to be wrong in my few attempts with it, but ymmv
- GeoAtreides 2y ago
  let's go kantian and imagine everyone would use such a service why would someone create a 10 minute video if no one would watch it and they would get no money for it?
  - jayd16 2y ago
    I assume some folks prefer the videos but if not, then why are they getting made? The creator can use the tool themselves and post it with ads. In fact, I'd prefer it.

baxtr 2y ago

Today I had a better experience with Google than with ChatGPT. I started with chat and asked why I couldn’t change the passcode on a kid's device. I tried 3 answers. None worked. So I google. First hit is an Apple forum with the exact problem. Solved.

sumedh 2y ago
What was the Apple forum's answer and what was ChatGpt's answer?

xbmcuser 2y ago

I don't think it will be as easy to supplant google search as it was in the past with Yahoo and Alta Vista. In the past internet search was just starting we were all used to trying different search engine and the results were different enough with all the different ways of indexing and searching that moving from 1 to another made a difference. Most of the people using the internet were a bit of pioneers navigating through something brand new and unique. Today majority of the internet users ie 10-32 years old or 60%+ of the internet users grew up with using Google and how to get best answers our of it. Chat gpt might bring in some churn but as long google is close enough it won't get replaced easily.

jerf 2y ago

Don't bet on AI staying clean. A lot of HN readers conceptualize the forces attacking the integrity of the search results as just some isolated people taking occasional potshots, and then maybe slinking away if their trick gets blocked. It is probably a lot more accurate to visualize the SEO industry as a Dark Google. Roughly as well resourced, with many smart people working on it full time, day in, day out, with information sharing and coordination. It isn't literally one company, but this conception is probably a lot closer then the one in the heads of most people reading this. Dark Google is motivated, resourced, and smart. And then, once I started thinking of it that way for this post, I realized that increasingly.... Google is increasingly at beck and call of Dark Google. They're increasingly the real customers of Google and the real source of money. It's why Google just seems to be getting worse and worse for us... it's because we're not the real customers any more. Dark Google rules. And if Dark Google has not yet figured out how to scam AI... it is only a matter of time. Dark Google is where Google gets its money now. When Dark Google turns its attention to AI fully, OpenAI will be no more able to resist its economic incentives than Google did. Can't wait for the first screenshot of someone searching for the impact of the battle of Gettysburg on the civil war and seeing the AI do its subtle best to slide an add for Coca Cola into it in some semantically bizarre manner.

m463 2y ago
Google isn't a search company, it is an identification company. that is its moat.
_false 2y ago
I like the Dark Google metaphor, but SEO agencies being Google's real customers makes no sense to me.
- jonplackett 2y ago
  Yeah I also didn’t get this. Can you explain what you meant?
- flpm 2y ago
  I think it's more a symbiotic relationship, they feed on each other and both benefit at the expense of the users

rlpb 2y ago

Infestation also applies to actual "organic" results. The old Google philosophy would have ranked pages with annoying pop-ups, paywalls, sign-in walls etc out of existence. Today's Google does not. They even tolerate sites that show them articles to index but are then hidden from the general public behind a paywall. The old Internet still exists, but Google's ranking behaviour hides it.

webspinner 2y ago

Google has put it's early 2000s history where it can't find it! In the garbage most likely, but somewhere deeper.

Timber-6539 2y ago

This article woefully assumes OpenAI has had the same R&D that Google has had as a search business.

paul7986 2y ago

Trying to replace Google w/GPT but.... - Local search results for businesses, phone #s, directions isnt available - Im paying GPT subscriber and it constantly logs me out on my different devices - Sora I can not upload photos of whoever & make them do whatever like https://hailuoai.video/ https://hailuoai.video/ which is free and at times fairly convincing (fun for the 12 yr old in you lol). I know GPT Search is new and Im excited for GPT to become a phone AI OS or Open AI & MIcrosoft developed their own phone with a new personal device paradigm... i.e. create a H.E.R. phone.. it's your personal AI Assistant that does all for you via text, voice, hand gestures, facial expressions, etc. Once you pick up your phone you see your assistant waiting to assist. You can skin your AI assistant to look like anyone living or dead (loved one could live on & help your throughout ur day). Probably some crazy ideas but a H.E.R. phone / personal device as described (some parts) would be something new/different and possibly give Apple and Android a run for their money!

summerlight 2y ago

Google seriously needs to scale up their generative models to all of crawling/indexing/ranking infrastructure. Their current ranking models are not capable of dealing with the next-gen web filled with 99% gen AI craps. I think they also know this. The problem is the cost and they're hyper-focused on bringing it down, but it is not fast enough.

_zagj 2y ago

> When Google came onto the scene, I credit its success to the tried and true paradigm that makes companies successful: simple and easy to use. > Yahoo was dominant back then, and it tried to put everyone and everything in front of you. Then we learned about the paralysis of choice. Too many choices, the mental fatigue weighed in, and the product became difficult to use. This nonsense again? I was around then, and I switched from Yahoo and AltaVista to Google despite its dumb name and stupid, childish logo because Google's results were hands-down better. Instead of a solely full-text search paradigm based only on keyword density, Google also ranked pages based on how many other pages linked to them, the so-called "PageRank" algorithm. This worked much, much better, and was much harder (for a while) to game. Before Google, it was common when searching to find pages that gamed the search engines by stuffing their <meta> keyword tags with SEO crap or putting it in giant footer sections in a tiny font the same color as the background (to render it invisible). Google's PageRank wasn't fooled by this. Also most of the major search engines adopted similarly minimalist UIs, and it did zero to stop the bleeding. They all lost to google. (AltaVista, the pre-Google Google, was still useful for a while for some specialty searching, like for anonymous FTP servers, and I wonder if DEC had never gone under or if Compaq had spun off AltaVista, maybe history would be different.) EDIT: I just realized the article doesn't even mention AltaVista. Unbelievable.

lakomen 2y ago

yeah Google Search is awful and there's still nothing better. What's new?

healsdata 2y ago

I'll be honest, I don't understand the example in this article -- it doesn't seem to be evidence of the thesis/complaint. The two dark mode screenshots are basically the same and, at a glance, I trust the Google one more because it's showing me a snippet of the authoritative source, Apple.com. Beyond that, there's no ads in the Google screenshot, which was a huge part of the thesis statement.

BogdanPetre 2y ago

Agree on the idea, however I think Perplexity is a better product than Open AI in search

aleph_minus_one 2y ago

> And even these ads weren't that bad. What made Google successful was showing ads you wanted to see. I'm searching for a bottle of wine, and ads for bottles of wine were shown to me. Even at that time, Google hardly ever showed me ads that I wanted to see (even though in former days, Google's ads were less intrusive than they are today): as I sometimes mention on Hacker News, most advertising networks have difficulties to "pigeon-hole" me into interest groups - many interests of me are somewhat niche. For example many Google searches that I do are about scientific topics from my areas of expertise - this is a rather hard topic for advertisisers (though it is plausible that it might be a lucrative topic for anybody who is capable to monetize on people like me). On the other hand, if (rather accidentally ;-) ) Google's advertising/interesting sorting algorithm actually "finds" some interest of me which can be "monetized" via ads that try to sell me something, it's the common case that I have already bought such a product recently - in such a situation I clearly don't need another piece of the product. The reason for this is simple: after I bought the product, I have to understand some of the product's "complicated convoluted details", so a lot of Google search queries are of the type "[product name] [potential problem that I have with the product]". Thus, I do a lot more Google search queries for the product after I bought it. It should be obvious that for the ad to pay off for the advertisier, it should be shown before I buy the product - thus Google has to be capable of interpreting the quite weak signals that might show that in the future I might want to buy such a product, and not the strong signals that Google sees in the weeks after my purchase.

kelsolaar 2y ago

I have been using Perplexity 95% of the time this past year.

a-dub 2y ago

google's playbook from the 2000s was to run a search engine based on a novel ranking algorithm that actually worked with a ui designed by engineers who like things fast, simple and minimal. the rest of the process described herein has been best described by cory doctorow as "enshitification."

JKCalhoun 2y ago

I may be overly cynical, may live in the rarified bubble of the tech-savvy, but I think Google as it has existed is already dead and doesn't yet know it. Their search results have been less than useless to me for some years now. And then LLM's came along and have been my go-to for all queries.

marginalia_nu 2y ago

> When Google came onto the scene, I credit its success to the tried and true paradigm that makes companies successful: simple and easy to use. If Google's competitive advantage was only that they had a clean and simple web page, I don't think they'd have nearly the sticking power they ended up having. You can design a front-end that looks like Google's original UI in a matter of hours. It seems implausible tale that in the 25 years since their ascendance, nobody has tried to compete with them with a simple-looking search box. Google became dominant because Google was much better than the alternatives.

alfor 2y ago

Google became an asset of the government. By selecting what you see they control what you think, what you buy who you vote for, similar to legacy media. Open AI has started on day one with that goal.

squiggleblaz 2y ago
This conspiracy theory is broken, because governments around the world have been struggling more than previously to get reelected. It might be that Google has been used to "select what you see so they control what you think, what you buy who you vote for, similar to legacy media", but they're not doing so under the control of government.
- alfor 2y ago
  This was proven in the Twitter files. The same was happening in Facebook and Google. There also independant research that prove this. hard to Google ;) Basicaly it's proven that just switching the autocomplete when you search Trump or Kamala can sway the votes of undecided by huge margin. The seek those and switch the suggestion were it matter. They also incite people to go vote depending on the choice and buch of other dirty tricks. You are right that it no longer work. In the end truth will always win because it connect to reality. Having just X switching to truth will swarm the world.
  - alfor 2y ago
    watch this is you are still unaware of the totalitarian machine. https://youtu.be/ye8MOfxD5nU https://youtu.be/ye8MOfxD5nU

lamuswawir 2y ago

Google's results from the AIStudio are really good results. Everything there is good. Probably because the studio has better models than are currently being used for general search.

firecall 2y ago

I honestly don't mind the current Google Search Results page design and additional features. For me, it's the web in general that isn't the same. Google Search is probably just as good, but I have an idea that the content to be indexed isn't what it was. Has the world changed, or have I changed? Probably both. The WWW of content isn't the same, and i don't search for the same things anymore. My use of search has become integrated in my patterns in the physical world. I need to know what products are in stock, where things are, when a restaurant is open and so on. For those searches, Google is generally excellent I find. Also, I actually find Google's AI Answers to be pretty decent. Even if I do ethically disagree with denying the original content authors those page views.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

All I see on Google for most searches is ads and SEO spam that gets the ranking and clicks. It’s only once I spend time scrolling it that I realize it has the telltale signs like very lengthy text that doesn’t answer the title succinctly.

aprilfoo 2y ago

Investors value OpenAI more than $150bn, but it just reported $5bn loss on $3.7bn revenue: the financial pressure is tremendous and that cannot last long. It's the same kind of situation as with Google vs. Yahoo in the early days, when the clean interface without much ads was a very strong USP.

djaouen 2y ago

I actually think this might push me towards using ChatGPT more. I just hate having to type, "What version was the iPhone in 2016?" rather than "iphone 2016 version number" lol

kittikitti 2y ago

OpenAI trains on sources like BusinessInsider which allow sponsored content for a price. This is how they will monetize their products, by intentionally introducing it to bias for a profit motive. It's a good thing they convinced you that its a black box, otherwise you would see this coming.

reynaldi 2y ago

In addition to the ChatGPT’s search, the advanced voice model also supports web search, making it even easier to search.

strogonoff 2y ago

I am working with a new for me tech, and got stuck integrating an SDK from a hardware manufacturer into my runtime. The SDK is in C, and my runtime isn’t. A friend suggested to use his LLM wrangling skills to get the SDK adapted. The results were interesting, but we wasted a day or two on trying to make it actually work and failed. Then it turned out I can call C code from within my runtime, which the LLM did not point out. I figured out the specifics with a bit of googling and successfully managed to call C functions. Yet there were still issues in parsing the data, now in C SDK itself; the friend used different LLMs to refactor and comment C code, but they did a bad job with missing implementations and a lot of general obvious comments (an empty deinitialization function with “clean up as needed” comment and so on). Then it turned out there was an SDK for my runtime. I just did not search enough. Of course, the LLM would not say that. The LLM would just obediently try to do what it’s asked to do and never question why.

xorvoid 2y ago

Between Kagi for ordinary web search and Claude for “complicated questions I don’t know how to phrase for a search engine”, I’m pretty happy right now. Great job to both organizations!

adxl 2y ago

In 1999 I worked at Yahoo! It was great the stock was flying, I worked on really cool tech writing C++ code. Then one day I went to a social dinner and a high schooler got up and made a speech and at one point said “I googled it”. Right then and there I know the gig was up. So far I have not heard anyone say I GPT’d it, but Google is running very dangerously close to the edge here. For one thing the founders have checked out, never a good sign. Something that also bugs people is GOOG wants to follow you everywhere, when you sign in to many websites that little blurb asking for your google account comes from a google server (<script src="https://accounts.google.com/gsi/client https://accounts.google.com/gsi/client" async defer>). I was responsible for servers that ran 100m page views a day at Yahoo! One day I was approached by this smarmy little guy who asked if he could pull logs from the machines. Alarm bells. Who the heck was this and what was he doing with the logs. I knew of course he worked for Filo and so I had to give over the data. This was the start of the spying on the customers. Google is a master of this, and it really irks a lot of their customers. Another red flag. Alternates like duck duck go and brave have made some inroads. Their percentages are quite low still. There have been layoffs in the name of cost cutting. Googlers have had some very public employee dissatisfaction meetings (my name for them). Employee compensation problems, problems with businesses the company is etc. One last thing, Mark Cuban sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion April 1, 1999 (seriously!). “ Apollo Global Management acquired a 90% stake in Verizon Media, which included Yahoo and AOL, for $5 billion. Verizon retained a 10% stake in the new company, which was rebranded as Yahoo upon the deal's completion.” The deal was finalized Sept 1, 2021 according to chatGPT.

johny115 2y ago
I say ChatGPTed it almost every day, or some form of it, OpenAI dropped ball on the name. Me and me friends say "asked CHatGPT, asked GPT, asked AI (but mean ChatGPT)" ... it hurts though as it's all too long and akward, no intuitive verb to use. Probably just my limited perspective, but I am also noticing, it's vastly men who use ChatGPT daily on anything from random questions, to health queries or personal growth. Not sure why, but somehow, I don't know a single female who would use it much, beyond super basic queries. Meanwhile guys of all kinds of backgrounds, nerds or not, technical or not, young or old, doesn't matter ... if there is a heavy user, it's a guy. But as I say, just limited perspective, I don't know big enough number of people for substantial sample size. Just recently I see the stark contrasts more and more, even very smart, nerdy and highly curious women I know, are not interested in ChatGPT.

herdcall 2y ago

Also check out Grok, it's surprisingly good, especially at organizing the results to get the job done for you. You can access it as part of X.

KTibow 2y ago

I'm surprised nobody (in the comments I scrolled by) has brought up the Web option (which only shows links) yet