19 ms·

Google changes its search box

• claytongulick 4mo ago
  Kagi is a great alternate. Privacy first, opt-in AI, total control over site blocking, zero ads. You're the customer, not the product.
• dandanua 4mo ago
  We are approaching the pinnacle of "privatize the profits, socialize the costs". No wonder the US is ruled by the straight fascists today.
• clearstack 4mo ago
  Google Search was $198B in 2024 — 57% of Alphabet revenue. There's no Plan B if AI summaries kill the click model. Cloud is 12%.
• egorfine 4mo ago
  Web search won't make shareholders happy. Agentic capabilities and AI-powered interactive features in the search experience - most definitely will. > You can still view traditional results only by selecting the “Web” tab in Google Search I think we should still get a couple of years of life from Google. This is enough time to figure out what to do next.
  • dmix 4mo ago
    Their web search property declining in usage due to aggressive new competition also won’t make investors happy
    • egorfine 4mo ago
      That's a tomorrow problem. Fiduciary duty requires pleasing shareholders TODAY.
• embedding-shape 4mo ago
  Basically people who want to search, will now not be able to, they'll be forced into a UI they might have consciously avoided, otherwise they'd be using their chatbot in the first place. Seems like a strange UX decision, rather than recommending "Hey maybe you want to try our chatbot", they just force the user into a chat straight up.
  • ivraatiems 4mo ago
    That's the whole shape of AI for consumer-facing functions like this. It's not superior to the previous experience, but huge sunk costs and a misguided belief it's the "next thing" is leading companies to try to force the issue. It's the Apple removing the headphone jack of the modern Internet. A change for the worse that we'll all have to find ways to work around.
    • munk-a 4mo ago
      Google famously dragged on development of Glass for more than a decade stubbornly failing to admit that nobody wants to look like a cyborg the entire time only to be swept aside by Meta when they built a device that was glasses first with some recording and interactions built in. If their leadership has an itch they'll scratch it until it's raw.
      • saltcured 4mo ago
        Was this a difference in strategy or more random luck having to do with fashion trends in different time periods? Did Meta patiently wait until exaggerated glass frames were viable in the market? Or did they get lucky? Or did they have some Machiavellian plot to steer this fashion for years and pave the way for their product..? ;-)
        • munk-a 4mo ago
          Google glass released in February 2013 and "I, glasshole" was written in December of 2013 which was a good formulation of ideas that had been floating in the tech sphere for a while. That's less than 1 year into their run that "Making myself look like a cyborg obviously makes people around me uncomfortable" was a plainly accepted fact. I think wearable tech is awesome and was interested in this (I was much more interested in the earlier pendant projectors though) but the fact that you're constantly reminding people they're being recorded without their consent is just a big issue. The meta glasses themselves might suffer a similar fate if hacks to disable the LED become commonplace. Much like Sony's (I think?) nightvision cameras if stuff like this gets abused by creeps it will isolate you to use it yourself even for perfectly reasonable intentions.
• ivraatiems 4mo ago
  Kind of Google to create a market opening for its competitors like this. I hope Kagi, Bing, and DuckDuckGo are taking notes.
  • torben-friis 4mo ago
    My literal first thought was "do I seriously need to use bing now?".
    • Supermancho 4mo ago
      Bing has been better than Google for some time. Again, it's embarrassing for them to sacrifice marketshare for paid results and an intermediate-form AI fad that will turn into the same paid result funnel.
      • RyanOD 4mo ago
        I hear people cite other search engines as "better" all the time. Better how?
        • edelbitter 4mo ago
          e.g. for a two keyword search, Google & DDG return results containing a similar (but more at the moment, more popular, so I understand why they do this) keyword as the first one, and no relation whatsoever with the second. Any search that manages to actually show results related to both of my input terms get the "better" award from me.
      • mrweasel 4mo ago
        Bing is surprisingly not to bad. I don't use it anymore, but it's been providing better results than Google for sometime.
    • sphars 4mo ago
      There is a 99% chance (IMO) that Microsoft is going to go the same route as Google here
• hyperhello 4mo ago
  Every organization eventually is taken over by the people who operate within it effectively, to the detriment of the people who operate outside and provide the actual public value. Google’s making a terrible, though understandable, mistake. They think people go to Google to see what Google wants to show them. This is like the people who run the airport imagining that travelers are popping by to see the decorations. They are surely hearing themselves say the same things about how Google is “everything in one place” that every failed corporation parrots on their way out.
  • reed1234 4mo ago
    Google is trying to change that though. Ie a Mini Empire State Building in JFK
  • cynicalsecurity 4mo ago
    > They think people go to Google to see what Google wants to show them. They are making the same mistake as Yahoo did. Ironic.
• caspper69 4mo ago
  It's been over for years. Google scares companies into bidding against each other just to be seen. It's a complete farce & a racket. It's the pay to play web.
• simonw 4mo ago
  Nilay Patel has been talking about "Google Zero" - the moment when Google effectively stops sending any traffic to other sites - for a few years now: https://www.theverge.com/24167865/google-zero-search-crash-housefresh-ai-overviews-traffic-data-audience https://www.theverge.com/24167865/google-zero-search-crash-h...
  • ekidd 4mo ago
    Which as some running a website raises a fascinating question. If Google is just going to crawl my sites and present information as an AI summary on their site, then what exactly do I gain by allowing Googlebot to crawl my sites?
    • gsky 4mo ago
      I asked the exact question back in 2011 when they were showing images directly leaving me pay for bandwidth out of my pocket
    • whazor 4mo ago
      Websites tend to be updated and considered to be the source as well.
    • Andrex 4mo ago
      Free speculation: I could see a future where Google populates a footer on results with the website logos of the sources. Presumably, the new web will require users to memorize websites/brands and go directly to those sites if they see a lot of their results are being provided by one source. Websites may go back to being simply labors of love.
      • victor106 4mo ago
        >I could see a future where Google populates a footer on results with the website logos of the sources. ChatGPT/Claude does this today. I barely click or care for the source when they already have me the info I wanted. My speculation is all information worth anything is going to be behind some kind of wall.
• Havoc 4mo ago
  Initially I thought AI would would crush google search, but starting to think the opposite. Think they have survived the transition. After I got tired of perplexity's nonsense I realized the workspace account (which I have for custom email domain) came with fancy gemini pro chat. Was a fucking ripoff for the domain thing...but domain plus premium chat clearly marked as "we won't train on your data"...the math starts mathing better again.
• zarzavat 4mo ago
  I haven't used Google search for years. It's almost totally irrelevant at this point and existing on pure inertia. I'm aware that most people still use it, but it's nothing like the glory days when Google was far ahead of the pack.
  • RyanOD 4mo ago
    How can you say Google search is "totally irrelevant" and follow that with "I'm aware that most people still use it"?
    • zarzavat 4mo ago
      When Google search first appeared it was miles ahead of the pack. There was no alternative worth using. They had a true monopoly insofar as nobody was able to compete. Nowadays, if Google Search were to disappear, I would hardly notice. That would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. The alternatives to Google got better, and Google itself got a lot worse. They still have the numbers but they don't have the product anymore and they're just juicing it until the end.
• andrewstuart 4mo ago
  There is a lot at stake for Google - that search box has firehosed cash non stop into the company money bin for decades.
• whalesalad 4mo ago
  It's been over for years. I switched to Kagi during the pandemic and haven't looked back.
• thevillagechief 4mo ago
  I understand the consternation here about this change. And I've noticed recently getting frustrated because I'm looking for a search list but the UI throws me into AI mode first. But the think is I use traditional search so much less now that those annoyances are the exception. I can't say whether they are making a mistake, but they've got to have extensive data, and I'm going to bet that an overwhelming amount of people don't click through to the search results anymore for most quick queries. They probably really don't have a choice if they are going to effectively keep ChatGPT at bay. Of course, all this is terrible for the internet. That headline should have been: The Internet as you know it is over.
• CooCooCaCha 4mo ago
  I think this will be one of those things that the hacker news crowd lambasts and calls a mistake but will either be neutral or seen as a positive to your average user.
  • adamiscool8 4mo ago
    Agree, but the average user trusts the AI knowledge box as expert summary, even though clicking through often reveals contrary information, so this is going to be a net negative overall for a while…
  • munk-a 4mo ago
    I think you underestimate how many users loathe that "Generated with AI" box. But for me the bigger question is why they're going all in on this instead of a gradual rollout or a new tool offering.
    • CooCooCaCha 4mo ago
      I think people are sick of hearing about AI but they’ll embrace this change for the simple reason that they hate computers and want to feel like they’re taking to a human.
  • Bolwin 4mo ago
    The average user may be fine with it (though I think many will not). But given this is basically killing the open web, I don't see where Google plans to get the results to feed this AI thing in a year or so
  • kakapo5672 4mo ago
    Yeh, my sense as well. I'm just out of college, and can tell you people my age use AI all the time and will probably be happy with this change. There is a diehard anti-AI group, but it seemed smaller all the time over the past couple years.
  • bigstrat2003 4mo ago
    The average user makes fun of how bad the Google AI generated responses are. I somehow don't think they're going to embrace a plan for that slop to be the only thing available.
• LogicFailsMe 4mo ago
  Slop as a Service (SaaS)...
• aquir 4mo ago
  Time to pay for Kagi everyone!
  • loehnsberg 4mo ago
    Time for Kagi MCP to become available to subscribers! [1] https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp
  • Hackbraten 4mo ago
    Until you realize that Kagi only works well because it uses a (paid) third-party API which behind the scenes does a classic Google search, scrapes its results in real time, throws out the ads, and then returns the cleaned-up results. If Google Search changes, then Kagi's search will be impacted directly.
    • BrunoBernardino 4mo ago
      This isn't entirely true, because they use more than one search index.
      • Hackbraten 4mo ago
        The other search indexes are largely negligible in comparison: [0] > This is not a competitive market. It is a monopoly with a distant second place. > The search index is irreplaceable infrastructure. Building a comparable one from scratch is like building a parallel national railroad. Microsoft spent roughly $100 billion over 20 years on Bing and still holds single-digit share. If Microsoft cannot close the gap, no startup can do it alone. [0]: https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search
        • AlienRobot 4mo ago
          This is a problem of their own invention. Nobody said you have to index the entire web. The web would probably be a lot healthier if we had several small search engines that focused on niches rather than 5 failed search engines that tried to index everything that was ever written and then ended up paying Bing.
• pclowes 4mo ago
  I understand why they are doing this. My Google search usage is easily down 50%+. I doubt I am unique here. While there are times where I want pure search (Kagi, Old Google) I mostly use LLMs to search now and have them provide me links for source data. When I do use LLMs as a search engine I always want it integrated into my AI workflows with access to tools and scripts etc. I never want to have a conversation with a website that is geared towards advertising me products.
  • ivraatiems 4mo ago
    I'm not at all in the same boat as you; I do not and likely will never primarily rely on LLMs for information. But it's fascinating to hear that even folks who do don't find this approach useful.
    • deepfriedbits 4mo ago
      I'm not jumping in with both feet, either, but "never" is a very big word.
      • ivraatiems 4mo ago
        "Primarily" is the other key there. I'll use it from time to time with sources. But it's not first-line acceptable.
    • Corence 4mo ago
      I think LLMs are better at finding the most helpful sources now, but that's more a testament to how much the front page of web search has lost to low value LLM content.
      • embedding-shape 4mo ago
        The fact that you can express "Only show me websites run by Italian companies incorporated by Greece owners born in Turkey" for example, and it'll be able to filter through a bunch of stuff, just makes searching so much easier. Fuzzy-search is also on another level with language models.
• fidotron 4mo ago
  Objecting to this from the user end seems a bit like complaining the original Google was trying to be too magic when what you wanted was AltaVista. This has been the inevitable direction the whole time. The real problem here is assuming this takes off what incentives will anyone have to provide the information to feed the beast?
  • microtonal 4mo ago
    Also, as a user, I want websites written by real humans. I do not want generic LLM output always has the same boring style. I like human writing, perfectly native English, broken second language English, I don't care. Human writing is unique and makes reading a pleasure. Of course, even Google the search engine has gotten worse at surfacing interesting websites. First came the SEO spam websites, now the slop websites. I'm glad that alternatives like Kagi exist.
    • ignu 4mo ago
      I used to use DuckDuckGo out of protest, despite it being inferior, but sometime in the last year (between general improvements and Google's rapid enshitification) it started outperforming Google for me.
  • dawnerd 4mo ago
    Exactly, why should sites give free bandwidth to the google bots hammering them for nothing in return? Outside of retail, there's no point in allowing google to crawl if you're not getting anything in return.
  • torben-friis 4mo ago
    >Objecting to this from the user end seems a bit like complaining the original Google was trying to be too magic when what you wanted was AltaVista. This has been the inevitable direction the whole time. Did AltaVista get replaced by the owner of the site to justify a giant investment?
  • skywhopper 4mo ago
    ?? Google search results were in exactly the same format as Altavista results, only they weren’t filled with spammy nonsense. Now, the spam is back and it’s coming from Google itself.
• hsuduebc2 4mo ago
  Finally google search result ridden with ads and useless results will be replaced by chatbot answers also ridden with ads, unnecessary commenatry from the bot and ads.
• hootz 4mo ago
  That's why Kagi is the only subscription I don't actively think about cancelling. For the love of god, keep me away from Google and all of THAT. If Kagi goes down the same path, I'll selfhost something or just return to monkey and use link indexes and the favorites list + the native search of websites.
  • charles_f 4mo ago
    Self hosting a web search engine is probably quite a feat
    • hootz 4mo ago
      I believe it is a thing. Saw it somewhere, like a peer to peer search engine.
    • nostrademons 4mo ago
      It's actually not that hard now, once you get useful content. When I worked on Search (~2009ish), the primary index was called 4BBase, because it was the top 4 billion webpages (actually more like 5.5B during my time, but it had been around for a few years). A typical webpage is about 100K, and HTML compresses at 80-90% compression rates, so you're looking at 10-20K/page. The index would take about 50-100 TB. Even after the recent AI run-up, disk prices are about $20/TB for a 20TB, so you can store this index on 3-5 hard disks that will cost you about $1200-2000. For self-hosted use you don't need to serve them in 50ms, so you don't need to put the whole thing in RAM like Google did, you can serve off of disk. ElasticSearch uses basically the same data structures and gives you the same infrastructure that Google's ~late-00s search stack did, and is actually more advanced in some respects (like ad-hoc queries, debuggability, and updateability), so software isn't much of an issue. The big part missing that can't really be replicated today is the huge web of authentic hyperlinks. The reason Google was so good at search was because many humans effectively "tagged" a given webpage with a series of short, descriptive words and phrases. When they went to search for a page, Google could mine this huge treasure trove of backlinks to identify exactly what the page was good for, even if those search terms never appeared on the page. SEO and link farms kinda killed this, as did the rise of social media walled gardens, and so the Google of 2009 basically wouldn't work today anyway. Maybe if you pulled old versions of Common Crawl or archive.org you could reconstruct it, but the relevant pages are often offline anyway today.
• ulrashida 4mo ago
  Cool. I hope this blows up in their face and is reverted in a few months. I don't need my phone book index to suddenly not be an index and force me to use a call center instead.
• paulnpace 4mo ago
  I did not start using Google because the results were better. I started using Google because the interface was far superior in the time before adblocking existed and after Flash existed. Search results were better because they did not contain hidden paid results. Search was measurably improved with the second generation of Wikipedia. Google did an excellent job understanding this and tended to just place the Wikipedia article at the top. Also helpful for Google was that Wikipedia's original search engine was useless, similar for YouTube whenever it came around. Today, I use Google less than once per month. I'm not sure I've been there at all this year. Maybe at the end of last year I was using it and found nothing better than I found on other search engines.
• ReptileMan 4mo ago
  Google search has been dead for years. What we need now is back to the roots - just a simple grep for the internet augmented by pagerank and eventually some sort of ai and harness to sort the rubish out. The AI companies have the data and the harnesses. Google killed themselves when they made sure you can't search direct quotes or outside of your region. If I am going to sort trough vague crap - it is better AI to do it. And AI doesn't look at ads. There is real opening for a company that just crawls and gives access to other companies to build on top of the collected stuff.
• analogpixel 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  • gonzalohm 4mo ago
    No no, now it's intelligent. You don't get it, before it was just returning what you wanted to search for, now it uses a lot of compute to sometimes return what you were searching for and other times you get pretty cool hallucinations. It's like full circle back to the "I'm feeling lucky" , remember?
  • dang 4mo ago
    Please comment based on reading and looking.
• imoverclocked 4mo ago
  I don't trust facts from LLMs. When I am searching for something, I usually want to find primary sources. As soon as a number is involved, I do my best to not even look at the AI output. Even though the result is often good and combines information from multiple sources, it can also get things wrong by combining information from different eras or just plain outdated advice. AFAICT, without primary sources, the result is for entertainment purposes only.
  • nostrademons 4mo ago
    You can ask them to cite their sources. It's very good practice to do so, and to check those sources, because I've found that about 30-40% of the time their source doesn't support their answer at all.
    • dbbk 4mo ago
      All of Google AI Mode is sourced.
      • skywhopper 4mo ago
        Yes, and those sources often contradict the AI summary if you follow them (or if you know anything about the topic).
        • bsimpson 4mo ago
          A common pattern: Type your question in Android/Chrome search bar: "Is …?" AI Overview on the search results page: "No…" Click through to the AI mode tab/"Dive deeper with AI" CTA: "Yes…"
        • burnte 4mo ago
          I love when I read the source link and it says the exact opposite of what the AI summary said. Sorry, no, I hate that.
      • deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
• sublinear 4mo ago
  While I can certainly see this upsetting some people, I'm not sure if this is necessarily "bad". Web 2.0 was Yahoo Pipes, public APIs, IFTTT, etc. while this new "Web 3.0" acknowledges that those capabilities would rather be gatekept behind AI instead of entirely removed. At the very least we do get some of that functionality back without resorting to scraping anymore and it's now accessible to the layperson. I would think this would nudge the layperson to demand more and inevitably want the actual data without the training wheels or sandboxes. Is that not a "good" thing? Is the pushback against this out of genuine concern or just ideological?
  • alt227 4mo ago
    Web 3.0 was very famously empty blockchain promises. I guess that makes this Web 4.0? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3
    • cesarb 4mo ago
      No, Web 3.0 was the Semantic Web: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
      • alt227 4mo ago
        Apologies, I had my definitions mixed up!
• zkmon 4mo ago
  Internet search should remain internet search. If I want to use AI, it should be an option, not a replacement of internet search. Time to switch to old style search engines which still return the 10 blue links, with an AI option.
• cynicalsecurity 4mo ago
  Google has become exclusively an advertising company long time ago, it's stopped being a search engine since years. "Did you mean?" + excluded word was a pretty clear indication they stopped caring to provide any meaningful search whatsoever.
• einrealist 4mo ago
  So good SEO will require prompt injection now?
• notatoad 4mo ago
  >Google’s AI Overviews will also allow users to ask follow-up questions in AI Mode, beginning Tuesday, the company noted. have i been A/B tested into something, or has this been live for months? this doens't seem new.
  • hnsr 4mo ago
    Yeah, I've also already seen this for at least ~2 months
    • pests 4mo ago
      I wish the chats ended up in the gemini app. I never know which model or how much personalization its using in AI mode after a search.
• comrade1234 4mo ago
  I no longer use Google search for simple coding questions, even though it uses a bunch of Claude tokens to ask, for example, what's the null-safe operator in JavaScript vs ruby because it sends half my project with the question, I'll still just ask in my ide rather than a google search. I caught myself yesterday starting to ask Claude in my ide what ship did grace and Rocky take back to Rocky's homeworld.
  • tedd4u 4mo ago
    I wonder if users similar to this will continue to do so in the face of 2, 5, 10x price increases (in a post IPO world)
• jerf 4mo ago
  Does the math math on this to be "free" for a long period of time? Ads can only pay for so much and AI can really suck down the money. Ads have been close enough to covering costs for conventional internet search that even though I'm clearly the product and not the customer the relationship has still generally worked. If AI makes the "searching" 50 times more expensive, though, that could shift the relationship pretty badly in a direction of "if you're not paying for this you're not getting honest results". Paying may not sufficient for honesty but it may be necessary. Honest question. But anyone who wants to answer this and who looks at Google's income/profit/revenue and is bedazzled by the size, don't forget to divide out by the number of Google's customers and ponder what that means. The per-user numbers are the much more relevant numbers and much less likely to cause Large Number Syndrome.
  • AlienRobot 4mo ago
    To be completely honest, search is already so terrible it's difficult to imagine how could it get worse. Sometimes I get SO questions from 13 years ago with a version of a library nobody uses anymore. If I search in my native language almost every result is a Reddit thread that was originally in English but was machine translated to Portuguese and Google is fine with that for some reason. Searching for images just gets you AI images. If you need opinions on "what is the best X" you end up getting some content marketing from a website that offers some online service and probably has an .ai or .io domain. No matter what you search you get an AI overview wasting space and slowly generating an answer that could be completely made up, just wasting your time in two ways at once. Most long queries are simply completely ignored by Google. Almost every word ignored in order to show some sort of most popular result. You don't even know if there are no pages on the internet with what you searched for or if Google simply doesn't care to show any website that isn't sufficiently popular. In other words, never personal websites or blogs, only platforms and cloud services' content marketing blogs are allowed to appear in the results. I've found myself several times asking Claude if there is "research" on a subject or another because I don't want to have to try to wade through the AI overview, sponsored results, SEO spam, reddit, repeated results on the second page, etc. just to find something that ressembles actual relevant information.
    • 4mo ago
• oidar 4mo ago
  On the upside, perhaps the LLM will understand the intent of search operators now.
• tdiff 4mo ago
  I think perplexity implements the same. Ive been using it as a default search for a month and actually still find myself explicitly using Google instead. The ai generated summaries are slow, often miss the point of question and seem to be focused on user engagement, not in giving set of infos to sort out myself. So there are two different types of queries, and when I want llm's answer, I ask chatgpt directly.
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• victorkulla 4mo ago
  Even Yandex from Russia is a better search engine. But I am yet to come across a truly powerful, fair and accurate search engine.
  • Melatonic 4mo ago
    Kagi !
    • victorkulla 4mo ago
      Looks good apart from the Google tracking: https://fshot.org/utils/surfacescan.php?site=https%3A%2F%2Fkagi.com%2F https://fshot.org/utils/surfacescan.php?site=https%3A%2F%2Fk...
  • wao0uuno 4mo ago
    Self hosted Searxng instance. Even better if shared with other people.
• KevinMS 4mo ago
  Its becoming like a parasite killing its host
  • marcosdumay 4mo ago
    That patterns seems to be repeating in every company that invested in making an LLM. Google was the last exception.
• CrzyLngPwd 4mo ago
  I imagine that they have made this decision based on the search queries people use, and now have the compute to make better sense of them. We'll see if it works. I use chatgpt for complex queries, and for throaway ones I use just don't log in to it. I wouldn't use google for the same queries, since I normally use google to find specific things, not for a chatbot.
• adam12 4mo ago
  Google thinks they can do what Microsoft failed at.
  • bdangubic 4mo ago
    not a high bar to pass, google can (and did and does) a lot of stuff microsoft failed at
• neilv 4mo ago
  Often, if you visit a few of the top PageRank-ish search hits for a query, you can find where the "AI" answer was mostly plagiarized from... (For example, a random Redditor once said something, and the AI repeats it confidently and authoritatively, as if it is universal truth widely accepted by experts and applicable to the query.)
• tonymet 4mo ago
  Has the web been a meaningful experience since 2016? Before LLMs you might have visited 5 websites daily (besides utilities like banking / shopping /bills). Google concentrated on a handful of garbage-tier regime publishers with spammy ads. There were some holdouts like stack exchange and Wikipedia (at least attempting to produce quality content). I think we can concede the WWW vision of distributed libertarian publishing has been dead for a long time. LLMs were just the final straw. We ended up concentrating syndication on a few media companies like Google, Social Media companies. Look at the profit margins of advertising companies vs producers and you’ll get an idea as to why.
• theopsimist 4mo ago
  One good thing about the (current iteration of) AI era is it’s getting people used to paying directly for data. Yeah, of course i’d prefer information to be totally free. But if that isn’t possible, paying directly is far superior to paying for it via ad exposure.
  • svieira 4mo ago
    The problem is that it amazingly easy to bias the weights and the actual size of the bias is tiny. So maintaining a per-user ad biased profile is cheap and profitable. I doubt that "paying directly" will keep out the ad men (after all, Cable TV cost money. Netflix too. Both have ads.)
• expedition32 4mo ago
  The entire internet as I knew it is over. Everything trips Cloudflare and capcha's because of tech bros and their AI crusade. But at least I've experienced the golden age. I feel bad for all the kids who will never know what once was.
  • BrunoBernardino 4mo ago
    There are options [1] [2], they're just not as easy to find, don't give up hope! [1]: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-search/?license=free https://alternativeto.net/software/google-search/?license=fr... [2]: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-search/?license=commercial https://alternativeto.net/software/google-search/?license=co...
• maybewhenthesun 4mo ago
  Google search has been over for a few years already. Nearly all other search engines give better results with less annoying ads at the top. First thing I do when installing a new browser is switch the default search engine to duckduckgo. Duckduckgo's results are less good than google used to be, bu way better than google currently is.
• dweinus 4mo ago
  So to make this profitable they need ads revenue from it, right? Imagine for a moment the ways AI can manipulate responses and conversations for marketers, because I guarantee the marketers have already thought about it.
  • svieira 4mo ago
    Anthropic was talking about this as a "oh nifty, look at this" back in 2024: https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude The fact that steering one of these things is trivial nowadays and the vectors are close-to-free-to-store (since you don't need anything large to influence the space, see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahtbcExEKng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahtbcExEKng) means that this is very likely already happening.
    • kridsdale1 4mo ago
      “AI safety alignment” implies political bias injection from the very start. “We have to ensure models output text that is in line with the median politics of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors”, etc. Not a stretch to go from there to “Of course the model should recommend Mountain Dew. It’s got electrolytes!”
• paxys 4mo ago
  The hardest decision a company, especially in tech, can make is to disrupt an immensely successul business of their own before their competitors can. Apple killed their biggest cash cow, the iPod, to push a smartphone. Netflix killed its entire business of DVD rentals in favor of streaming. Microsoft stopped selling software in boxes and pivoted to SaaS. Similar to all of these the business of typing words in a search box and getting 10 blue links was dead the moment ChatGPT got popular.
  • AlienRobot 4mo ago
    I think ChatGPT got popular because they couldn't show 10 blue links right.
• cdrnsf 4mo ago
  I haven't missed it since switching to Kagi.
• gonzalohm 4mo ago
  Glad I switched to Kagi
• jgalt212 4mo ago
  How does this work for Google? I read it costs them $0.001 to perform a search. No matter how efficient their inference chips are, the new cost basis has to be 10X or more. And the zero click Internet not only kills ad supported content sites, it also kills Google SERP ad revenues.
  • xmcp123 4mo ago
    I have to imagine that eventually ads will be integrated in, or they will change the layout so the ads are side by side with the AI and the SERP results underneath.
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• matltc 4mo ago
  Lots of people talking about Google being strictly worse than a number of search engines (bing, duck, etc) not been my experience. Brave default search is awful. Duck was terrible last I used it. Google still great for me, but I have a decent amount of "privacy controls" implemented (DNS, vpn, browser extensions) and i basically dork most searches--average search looks more like a find invocation than English. In this last regard especially, Google is peerless, imo Been a while since I looked around though. Is there an engine that supports all the operators that Google does and that provides results of better or equivalent quality?
• AkshatRaj00 4mo ago
  [dead]
• deleted 4mo ago
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• HAL3000 4mo ago
  It was only a matter of time. Watching how less technical people behave in the LLM era, I've noticed that most people no longer say "Google something", instead, they say "ask ChatGPT" or "ask chat". Many technical people have also stopped using Google for a lot of search queries and now just let an LLM find the answer.
• frankzander 4mo ago
  I just want a relevant website ... no I don't want to use your agent. Just give me search results that are interesting to read, no AI slop, which teach me something new ... no I don't want to buy if I don't show this intent. Just serve the public interest and not your own financial interests. Thank you.
• docdeek 4mo ago
  How does a media company stay in business when there is no one visiting the site, and people are only getting the quality information from Google? Advertising on the media site (assuming digital media, no physical media) is going to disappear because people probably won't be clicking through to read the source material that the Google AI answer relied on. No traffic, no advertisers, no money to produce the original journalism. That's going to impact the Google results eventually as these media outlets shut down to be replaced with...AI slop, maybe? Is the subscriber model the answer? It could work for a niche subject or a single journalist with a following, and it wouldn't be sucked into Google results, either, if it was effectively gated/paywalled.
• LetsGetTechnicl 4mo ago
  Anyways, I find that my $10/mo subscription to Kagi has been well worth not having to deal with Google's BS. (And they do offer AI if you want but they don't push it on you.)
• alt227 4mo ago
  So how does google now make money when it is just providing us with direct answers from ai, instead of showing us both paid for search results and directing us to sites which host targetted ads? How does adsense work when there are no search results?
  • fooey 4mo ago
    I expect a flavor of affiliate marketing where you can never trust if the LLM is giving you the best recommendations or the most highly bidded recommendations
    • morkalork 4mo ago
      "Since we're on the topic of DIY car repairs, did you know Autozone carries a wide variety blorpity slop?"
  • comboy 4mo ago
    Obviously if you pay, the AI will really like your product. "Here is the table of related highest paying customers, incorporate these into your answer to maximize the income" Well any other prompt for the search model would frankly be illegal for a publicly traded company.
    • alt227 4mo ago
      But how is this sold to the customer? With adsense it is quantifiable, you set your max per click, per conversion etc, and can clearly see which you won and lost against competitors. This becomes very murky when paying for 'ai to like your product' vs 'ai to really like your product'.
      • comboy 4mo ago
        Same per click, it obviously includes links when looking for products, but impression could also be counted and arguably especially if present in the first few sentences it is a valuable impression. But then the separation of ads from content is lost so it becomes useless as product search, so maybe it isn't that trivial indeed. But it's not like even 10% of users is gonna find some other "search" engine and switch. edit: can't reply deeper and interesting question, I mean we all would love to have ability to search arbitrary strings and regexes through the web corpus, but currently when you type something you get that AI reply instantly for most queries, this makes me still use them, if you forgot some shortcut key or something it has currently unique value in terms of latency (even ignoring the fact that for most users you also use them by default by typing in the address bar)
• ch_123 4mo ago
  I use Google daily, and yet I can't remember the last time I used their search box - all of my searching has been done through the browser URL bar for a long, long time. I wonder if similar changes are being applied to the Chrome URL bar?
• calmbonsai 4mo ago
  I don't care. Aside from a single dormant GMail account I keep solely for "parental tech support", I de-Googled 5 years ago and strongly encourage everyone to do likewise. Google stopped being a customer-focused company after their 2nd major revision to GOffice and the PM shake-up in search from Raghavan https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ .
• pllbnk 4mo ago
  I wonder if the song they used for the video is also AI-generated. It's pretty catchy.
  • aslakhellesoy 4mo ago
    Dude it's Depeche Mode
    • pllbnk 4mo ago
      It was sarcasm. They are using song from 1980's to advertise their AI-everything 2020's dystopia.
• worik 4mo ago
  Makes me sad. I recall the beginnings of Google, so hopeful so new. Now they are a money printing corporate. I am sure there are still people there doing new and exciting things, but the Grey Suits have taken the reigns They could have used AI to make that awesome simple sparse home page better. Fought off the SEO optimiser that made search so dire in the recent past But no. They are doubling down on bling and crap. SEO is good for business. "Do the right thing". Not even close Makes me so sad.
• moralestapia 4mo ago
  This is great news. I remember Altavista, Yahoo and similar ones, they pioneered this type of home-page-is-all-you-need UI which is the perfect compromise of what product people at Google have come up with and what users want, at least according to their tests. This means that, in a couple years, we might see a competitor that offers you quick, almost instant web search, with a minimal UI, possibly an algorithm that somehow surfaces the most relevant results based on how all websites point to each other naturally (like, a site that is referred to by 20 others should be above one with zero references). I look forward to it!
• dfee 4mo ago
  tried it out: Search: "Hello world" > AI Overview > Hello! Wordle is the viral word-guessing game where you get 6 tries to uncover a mystery target word, using color-coded hints to guide your guesses.
  • saganus 4mo ago
    I got: "Hello, world! Welcome to the classic programming greeting. It is the traditional test message used to introduce beginners to computer science and verify that a language's syntax is properly understood" Which clearly shows that there will be an avalanche of issues when non-technical people discover the joys of non-deterministic results.
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• themagician 4mo ago
  Search doesn’t work well anymore anyway. Half of what used to be searchable has either been consolidated or is gated. Gmail search doesn’t work well either. It simply doesn’t find things. Almost as if they have stopped indexing and repurposed resources towards LLMs. And whatever there is left to index and search has been completely overrun with slop. Search is over. Internet as we knew it is over. Something new has emerged in its place, and we are still calling the new thing the old thing.
• BrunoBernardino 4mo ago
  If you'd like to switch from Google, I'll take the opportunity to let you know about Uruky [1], an ad-free and privacy-focused search engine, that's focused on a simpler experience than Kagi (no AI). Kind of like "old school" search. My wife and I launched it earlier this year, and it's been going really well so far. Id you'd like to try it for free for a couple of days, reach out with your randomly-assigned account number and we'll top it up for you. [1]: https://uruky.com https://uruky.com
• elorant 4mo ago
  I wish they could remove the AI overview crap that's dysfunctional and kills the very spirit of a search engine's premise. You're not supposed to steal links from sites Google. That's a fucking dark pattern.
• Hizonner 4mo ago
  I'm pretty sure I had something very similar A/Bed at me by Bing the other day. You know what I really miss? Being able to type a literal string in quotes and get pages that had that actual string on them. That's what I really miss.
• arionhardison 4mo ago
  I'm old enough to remember when "Google" was something that ended conversations. People — myself included — would literally say "Google it," the facts would be located, and that was that. Now that Google wants to be the conversation, I'm worried there will no longer be a bias-free source of information for the masses. This is all new, so I may be a bit hyperbolic, but the reason OpenAI introducing ads bothers me is the implicit (or even explicit) bias that can be smuggled into a chat in ways that simply aren't possible when you're just clicking through to an external source. There are all kinds of implications to Google no longer being that source of truth, even by default. Maybe this has quietly been the case for a long time, but this feels like the final move — pushing their ad bias (i.e., whoever paid the most) into a conversational system, where dark patterns are far easier to implement and much harder to detect. One answer to this might be domain-specific agents — narrower, accountable, ideally something you (or your community) actually run. But even then it all falls back on trust: you being a good-faith actor, and others trusting that you are one. Which is to say, we're back to the same problem, just at a smaller scale.
  • Forgeties79 4mo ago
    >I'm worried there will no longer be a bias-free source of information for the masses. There was never anything bias-free about google search. It "ranks" information based on all sorts of qualities. At our most generous we can call it somewhat of a "consensus" check. Historically it was a tool for quickly getting you in the vicinity of an answer that most would consider correct. Remember "google bombing"? Hell SEO alone invalidates any assertion that google search is a valid source of truth and that's be going on for a long time.
  • brokencode 4mo ago
    With sponsored links and aggressive SEO, “Google it” has been falling apart as a source of facts for a long time. There is an incredible gap in the search literacy between different users of Google. Some will accept what they find in the top links, no matter how dubious the source.
    • muddi900 4mo ago
• baxtr 4mo ago
  Today is the day the old internet died. RIP.
• bossyTeacher 4mo ago
  I haven't used google search as my default search engine in YEARS. DDG is good enough for 99% of my searches. Same with Google Chrome. Stop giving evil companies your traffic and attention.
• nraleigh 4mo ago
  I think this is the second time in a week (the first being the "Googlebook") that Google's promotional announcement video showcasing UI is so full of special effects, dramatic pan/zooms, and woosh sounds, that I have no idea how the final-end product actually looks or works.
  • zeafoamrun 4mo ago
    I watched this video too, and like the google book one, I have no idea who this product is for
  • quantumleaper 4mo ago
    It looks like an output of one of those AI video editors that some (often vibecoded) startups use for their product launch videos. Just drop some assets in, and it spams witty taglines with dramatic transition effects.
  • sourcecodeplz 4mo ago
    I had to stop it because it was making me dizzy trying to focus on what was shown
  • notatoad 4mo ago
    in both cases, the reality is that nothing has changed all that much. the googlebook is a laptop. the search box doesn't really work differently to how it did yesterday. (how it worked ten years ago, yes it's very different. but ai mode is already here). neither of these things are a big deal. the promo videos are for the sake of making promo videos.
  • testycool 4mo ago
    Agree. Felt the same way about the first video and wanted to leave a comment but wasn't sure if it's just a me problem.
• Yokohiii 4mo ago
  So you can code in search now and create apps. No clue how that in depth works out. For them, the dream could be that everybody has their custom apps hosted by google. It doesn't seem to be secure. If every google link is one step away from a prompt injection and leaking all your data, then they are worse then npm. I wonder how many days it takes until they roll it back or put that stuff behind some extra clicks.
• teekert 4mo ago
  This is to Open Claw what Google home is to Home Assistant. I prefer the Claw like I prefer Linux and FOSS in general. Since day one Googs’ vision was to make the Star Trek computer. They’re really there now. But I don’t like their how. This computer serves them, not me. My mind-bicycle must serve me, my thoughts are my own. I hope my resistance is not futile.
• gyulai 4mo ago
  The “magic” of the SERP is that it makes the organics product and the ads product reinforce each other: People come for the organics and don't have to pay. That brings eyeballs, which advertisers pay for. If Google no longer sends users to websites for free on organics, the world will have to figure out some mechanism whereby Google pays site owners for putting the information on the web in the first place. Where will that money come from? If it's ads, the AI experience is a “lies engine” where advertisers get to pick which lies the AI tells. Not sure what kinds of people would show up for that experience. Probably the same kind who watch home shopping TV. I would venture to guess that there will be a ceiling in the advertising value of that property. Or the AI interacts with people in good faith. But then, if I'm an advertiser, how do I get my lies into the world? “We will tell your lie, only if it's a truth” doesn't work because, as an advertiser, I understand that the truth about me already gets spoken, and I don't need to pay a dime for that. You can run an argument that people can tell ads from organics on the current SERP, and you can calibrate how much of each there should be. But you can't really “calibrate” the amount and level of the lying in the AI to where it's just enough so that people will show up, but not so much that there's no value for advertisers. You can't have little boxes either, where the AI is like “having told you the truth, I want you to also pay attention to this lie that someone paid me to tell you: …” Is Google really saying: “Hey, we're the lion's share of the advertising market right now. But, because we kind of like these newfangled AI things, we're going to just vacate that spot to whoever. Instead, we will turn ourselves into a pre-product-market-fit company. Maybe at some point over the next 10 years, we're going to be able to tell you how we might actually monetize ourselves. Stay toooooned.” The reason why AI is a better experience than the web right now, is because we have pre-enshittification AI and post-enshittification web. What will the whole thing look like, after enshittification is through with AI?
• perfmode 4mo ago
  Google is making the pivot. And they’ve got such a strong strategic position. Full-stack integration. They will survive and thrive in this new era. Search seems safe. Yet, other products are still vulnerable to encroachment.
• bryanrasmussen 4mo ago
  Hmm, perhaps should switch fields and become a factologist https://medium.com/luminasticity/artificial-stupidity-and-the-future-of-factology-f892941010a4 https://medium.com/luminasticity/artificial-stupidity-and-th... >And I think we can throw out all the complaints of the past few years about how Google quality is lowering and it is hard to find anything on the site anymore, for those were the salad years. >At least back in the day when sites copied answers from Stackoverflow or Lyrics from RapGenius and put them in their own site with scammy pitches to pay for the content you were going to get the correct answer in the end, but now you need a factology degree to figure out if something is bullshit or not.
• sucrosesucrose 4mo ago
  There are a number of "hide AI overviews from google" browser extensions. Use them.
• crorella 4mo ago
  what a weird surface to put LLMs
• childofhedgehog 4mo ago
  The inability to do a proper search with “-x” x being a word you want excluded from the results but I can being able to have a convo about summary results is just mindblowing. I miss proper search. What’s everyone using for alternatives?
  • user3939382 4mo ago
    Kagi supports this
• kakugawa 4mo ago
  I've found Google AI Search to be good for really topical searches. And its conversational ability has noticeably improved over the last year. I can now have a (short) conversation where I reference past messages.
• varispeed 4mo ago
  Bring me Google before the instant search nonsense where I could go into rabbit holes 100+ pages deep. Now it can't find anything interesting. As a search is basically useless and it's more like Home pages used to be (that you would very much build yourself in a html editor and place your most often visited sites).
• kotaKat 4mo ago
  I genuinely feel like I could have a breakdown over this. I’m so fucking tired. I don’t want it. I didn’t want it. I didn’t need it. And now here we are, once again, shoving it fast and hard in my face. Thanks, Google.
• Normal_gaussian 4mo ago
  Ask Joogle or Ask Geeves? https://www.techradar.com/computing/search-engines/ask-jeeves-quietly-shuts-down-after-nearly-three-decades-after-pioneering-conversational-web-search-long-before-chatgpt-and-gemini https://www.techradar.com/computing/search-engines/ask-jeeve... / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask.com Ask Jeeves was dissolved 15 days ago
• fscaramuzza 4mo ago
  What scares me about this new AI mode thingy is that every answer sounds like a systematic literature review, but only for the results. For example, if I look for users feedback about a specific product, it says "People think that..., but also that...; It's important to notice that some people ..." where with 'people' it means just a random comment on a random website just because it thought it was a good contribution to the results. Sounds like it's giving a ground truth from "multiple" data, when instead it's just aggregating almost random stuff. In the context of a systematic review, the feature that I would love the most is augmenting my initial query, so that I can just get more results that I could find interesting. I am 100% sure they thought about this, but ignored it for the most profitable option.
  • cyanydeez 4mo ago
    Well, you'll be happy to know that most of American media is exactly the same way: 2 people on twitter will generate a "Americans find Widget X is bad"
  • burnte 4mo ago
    > What scares me about this new AI mode thingy What scares me is the rampant inaccuracy. In my experience, the AI responses are wrong about 65% of the time. I just did a search today about an error talking about a disconnected link between apps, and Google AI result summary told me that the error was related to my pulling a USB drive too quickly in windows. The ONLY word similar to my query and that AI response was the word "disconnect". Everything else was clearly about the SaaS apps. I have people coming to me, asking me questions, then telling my Google told them something else, so now I have to waste time convincing them that it's wrong. Over the past 2 years AI has done nothing for me but complicate my work life. And of course, this could be because the model is crap, but it could be because they want me to keep refining my query over and over for more ad views. Either way, it's a terrible experience.
    • deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    • sanitycheck 4mo ago
• beej71 4mo ago
  How is Google going to make money off this?
• MAGAtssuck 4mo ago
  [dead]
• hansmayer 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• frenchie4111 4mo ago
  I get that they have to make changes to the google search box because so many people are just using ChatGPT/Cluade to answer questions instead of google. However, I specifically use Google (or DDG) when the LLMs are failing me. When I want "research something on my own" because the LLM is giving me garbage, or untrustworthy information. If Google completely replaces their search box my Google usage will go down even further. I don't plan to use Google's LLM when Cluade is just better. Now that Google's search features are gone (or going away) I no longer have any reason to turn to them at all
  • Insanity 4mo ago
    Agreed, but I think that might be our tech bubble. My non-tech family still just types searches in the URL bar of their browser first, and I'm sure others just have google as their browser homepage. I assume that's actually a pretty common use-case for most non-tech users.
• sourcecodeplz 4mo ago
  damn this is some real slop. not expected from google. i played the video, didnt understand anything and got dizzy. then i tried to scroll but the browser tab froze? wow
• sourcecodeplz 4mo ago
  I've noticed this since yesterday when i tried to do a site:url search, it gave me an AI chatbox and answer
  • layer8 4mo ago
    This still works for me: https://www.google.com/search?udm=web&tbs=li:1&q=site:reddit.com+%22google+search%22 https://www.google.com/search?udm=web&tbs=li:1&q=site:reddit...
  • lucb1e 4mo ago
    Same, came to google after DDG failed to locate a string that I suspect would occur (error message on Factorio forums). Google then gives me some LLM hallucinations about what the error might indicate, also when you specifically don't click the "use AI mode" button (that the search button automatically turns into) but the "search" button. You don't get any search results whatsoever. After it started wasting energy on hallucinations, you're allowed to click "all", meaning "web search, please" (should be obvious to anyone) Why in the world would it specifically do this for site:https://example.org https://example.org "exact string" queries?! I know what I'm looking for and where it can be found! It's like redirecting my phone call from ISP support to a librarian because maybe the library contains the answer to a dysfunctional SIM card they've sent me
  • xeeeeeeeeeeenu 4mo ago
    It seems they have been A/B testing killing search operators (like "site:" or "inurl:") for a while. They randomly stop working and switching to private mode, or the other way around, makes them work again.
• ChrisArchitect 4mo ago
  For years already google has had integrations and more 'intelligent' responses for things like weather, shopping, answers to queries etc. This hardly changes any of that (most of the 'features' are inside AI Mode). For 'regular' uses this changes nothing. Avoid AI Mode most of the time. Double-check most automated overview options. And still not using any kind of chat interface when searching for sites, things, images, whatever. Hardly changes anything. And Google is still the destination for all lookups. With little to no reason to go looking for a different service especially not from any other AI-related firm.
• mwkaufma 4mo ago
  Where are the PageRanks of yesteryear?
• layer8 4mo ago
  Hopefully they don’t kill tbs=li:1, or I’ll get pretty angry.
• stinger 4mo ago
  You can search, understand and hallucinate - do anything. All you have to do is ASK.com
• TimCTRL 4mo ago
  but i dont know who visits google.com anymore
  • HDBaseT 4mo ago
    Effectively every internet user, multiple times a day.
• h1fra 4mo ago
  How much longer can the internet survive if we just stop sending traffic to websites?
• overgard 4mo ago
  I miss having a good search engine. Even before AI.
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• ori_b 4mo ago
  I suppose it would not be in line with their business plans to make google search actually search again.
• sroussey 4mo ago
  To change anything on the home page of google, amazon, etc, must be a hair-raising experience for the people making those changes.
  • dmix 4mo ago
    Just the cost alone of adding this much LLM to google homepage ...
    • ares623 4mo ago
      They already did the capex. Might as well use it, it's not like it was being utilized otherwise. Must be awkward to see your $10B datacenter sitting at 10% utilization.
• yubblegum 4mo ago
  > Designed to anticipate your intent, it also helps you formulate your question with AI-powered suggestions that go beyond autocomplete. The first red flag for me. The +/- of this type of feature are well worth exploring.
• nvarsj 4mo ago
  Thank god for Kagi. It literally saved search for me, although I mostly use kagi.com/assistant these days.
• tossacct444 4mo ago
  I've been using google search, and all other products, less and less. i find a mixture of perplexity and chatgpt perform much better and find higher quality results faster. the degoogling process will be a long haul but im determined to do it.
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• graeme 4mo ago
  It's not clear to me from this announcement. The articles make it sound like all searches now go to ai mode and no more blue links. But Google's description seems more minimal, like easier to get to ai mode, search box can expand intelligently based on input. Is there any clearer description of the magnitude of the change?
• sleepycat801 4mo ago
  Google search itself is becoming useless. It tends to promote social media results even when scarcely relevant, and just can't find things like part numbers that even baidu can find on English language pages. The AI then summarises social media posts.
• Painsawman123 4mo ago
  Google search box has basically become an AI aggregator that doesn't give anything back to those websites it scraps data from, and it'll result in the death of the internet as we came to know it At this point, google might as well stop showing website links in search results. with AI Overviews, barely anyone’s clicking through it anymore
• OptionOfT 4mo ago
  In the last 10 (maybe longer) years I've noticed I've changed how I am approaching these changes. In the past, I excited. It was the first to sign up for all kinds of betas. I don't know what triggered the my reasoning, but now whenever I see these upcoming announcements I don't think about how it's gonna be better, but how it is objectively gonna be worse. How much harder is it going to be for me to compare things. How much more do I now need to go and explain people that the output is merely a mathematical average of what's out there, and if it's out there on the internet doesn't make it correct.
• Brian_K_White 4mo ago
  huh, one downside of being an all-in Firefox and Kagi user, meaning I have everywhere firfox as default browser with kagi account configured, all laptops, tablets, phones, means I am now out of touch and never noticed.
• marginalia_nu 4mo ago
  Sometimes I hear lies and slander about big tech pulling up ladders and misusing their advantage to cement monopolies, but just look at this! I believe I speak for everyone working on alternative search engines when I offer a heartfelt thank you to Google for their untiring effort to derail their search product.
• swolios 4mo ago
  This ruined my experience using chrome on my phone. Done with it.
• yakbarber 4mo ago
  the thing that bothers me is I don't usually want this mode. When I search, I am not looking for what google thinks, I am looking for what other sources think.
  • notsydonia 4mo ago
    Yes! And for actual research, I like to see a variety of sources and opinions, as well as some links to granular or primary data if apt. I don't even like A.I. summary of product reviews because they're SO bland and not needed. Even aside from the traffic-choking, content stealing insult to legit creator sites, it's like a giant, insidious flattener of human color and interest.
• divbzero 4mo ago
  It’s diverged quite a bit from the original: <form method="GET" action="/search"> ... <center> Search the web using Google! <br> <input type="text" name="query" value="" size="40"> <br> <select name="num"> <option value="10" selected>10 results <option value="30">30 results <option value="100">100 results </select> <input type="submit" value="Google Search"> <input type="submit" name="sa" value="I'm feeling lucky"> <br> <i>Index contains ~25 million pages (soon to be much bigger)</i> </center> ... </form> https://web.archive.org/web/19981111183552/http://google.stanford.edu/ https://web.archive.org/web/19981111183552/http://google.sta...
  • dullcrisp 4mo ago
    When did they change the "query" to q?
    • krackers 4mo ago
      Saving bytes on the wire?
      • dullcrisp 4mo ago
        I guess maybe after the thousandth time they had to type it out.
    • jedberg 4mo ago
      When they got big enough that that change made a noticeable difference in both performance and their bandwidth bill (which was pretty early on).
  • rafael-lua 4mo ago
    > <center> What a nostalgic classic.
• hmokiguess 4mo ago
  Also their universal shopping cart seems to be quite a change too https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/shopping/google-shopping-cart/ https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/shopping...
• wayeq 4mo ago
  AI search.. they should at least put that behind a "I'm feeling unlucky" button
• ok123456 4mo ago
  I think I'll be getting a Kagi subscription.
• Scroll_Swe 4mo ago
  I kind of like it for dumb one off questions I dont want to burn my real tokens on...
• epohs 4mo ago
  The shark has fully cleared it’s jump.
• mplanchard 4mo ago
  I know a lot of regular people who hate this, but Kagi can be a hard sell for regular people. What are y’all’s recommendations for free search engines at the moment? I used to rec DDG, but I feel like their results are much worse than Kagi’s at present
  • yegg 4mo ago
    Our results have continually improved, and would be happy to take your feedback (email is in my profile) if you give it another try.
    • mplanchard 4mo ago
      Thanks, I will do that
  • seriocomic 4mo ago
    Happy Kagi user - what 'sold' me (albeit already working in the space) was the adage of "if you're not paying, then you're the product" - having my results being manipulated to be constantly advertised to was something I was prepared to pay a token amount to avoid.
• legitster 4mo ago
  Up to now, the Gemini results they display are often worse and less accurate than the same question asked in Gemini. I'm guessing SEO has so thoroughly cooked Google's search results that they are actually holding back Gemini as a brand. It looks like the new experience works backwards - it's more or less a Gemini prompt that they then stuff a "search experience" into. Obviously the search feed and ads are so integral to Google's business model that they probably can't confidently just step away from it.
• galleywest200 4mo ago
  Scrolling down this article presented me with pop-up dialogues twice. Annoying.
• insane_dreamer 4mo ago
  of course; ever since ChatGPT first launched it was clear this is what Google would do to its search good luck getting visits to your site unless you're paying for AI placement
• 6thbit 4mo ago
  The last product i thought google would kill, that isn't ads, the true end of an era with an underwhelming bang. I wonder if they will stop using pagerank completely? Has pagerank already transcended the software plane?
• josh-wrale 4mo ago
  Surely, the motivation here is a mega influx of training data.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago
  NYT found 10% of answers are wrong https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/technology/google-ai-overviews-accuracy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/technology/google-ai-over...
• KoolKat23 4mo ago
  The unnecessary mention of Antigravity in there gives me Microsoft Copilot vibes.
• sota_pop 4mo ago
  So many questions: Is “the goal of Search” really: “to help you ask _anything_ on your mind”? If “reimagined Search” is “designed to anticipate your intent”, Would it correctly infer my intent to not utilize an agentic approach? Is there an “off switch”? As for “Search agents” “operating in the background 24/7”, What is the carbon footprint of that? How do I turn it off? How do I ask it to stop phoning home my every keystroke? These questions are asked partly rhetorically because it’s likely I don’t need a team of “24/7 Search agents” to help me guess the answers… Historically, I scoffed when someone said “here’s the difference between a google search and asking ChatGPT”, or when people said that ChatGPT would “kill search”, but Google sure seems to be in a hurry to burry the original feature all by themselves.
  • varenc 4mo ago
    People saying ChatGPT will kill search, really mean LLMs generally will kill old school web searches that just return links. Google is doing this because they agree with the sentiment and are just becoming ChatGPT.
• nkingsy 4mo ago
  I had an interesting one yesterday. Someone responded to me on Reddit with very official sounding words to make their argument. I was still dubious and googled a few of the concepts they threw out there. The AI confidently told me they were right. Then I checked the sources, and found the only source that agreed with them was their own Reddit comment!!!
  • rwhitman 4mo ago
    I've found this several times as well. I googled something to dispute a comment in reddit, and google "confirmed" it as accurate, citing what the person said in that exact reddit comment. Google has become the ouroboros
    • jjulius 4mo ago
      A few days ago I went looking for something music-related that I've been trying to find for a long time. Google's AI response confirmed it existed and described it almost exactly as I've described it in the past. It was then that I noticed the source. It was citing my own old comment, here on HN, about that musical moment as evidence that it existed. That was surreal.
  • sota_pop 4mo ago
    I can also relate here, seeking a product review on Sony wh1000x_, Google wrote a nice seeming summary, but scrolling down to some Reddit discussions, stumbled upon a single comment that was very nearly verbatim what the “AI Summary” said, only the ai summary phrased the summary as if it were a sentiment aggregated over many users’ experience. i.e.”users say…”
  • bryanhogan 4mo ago
    Reddit is heavily filled with bots at this point, feels like every question is made to then promote their product or service using multiple bot accounts.
    • Rp8yXmdmr 4mo ago
• facemelt2 4mo ago
  A lot of people in these comments have strong opinions about the performance of a service they use frequently, for which they pay zero dollars, and is run by a public company with a fiduciary duty to provide ROI to its investors. I wonder how many of them would switch to a paid model that offered pre-ai-era google search?
  • dmix 4mo ago
    I’m just waiting for someone to announce they made a classic Google search engine alternative (which they coded using AI).
• twodave 4mo ago
  The spend difference for this must be enormous. I wonder how they justify it financially. I guess they don’t have to.
• lta 4mo ago
  I started switching to DDG on some devices, this will motivate me to finish the transition ! Thanks
• octygen 4mo ago
  Why replace something deterministic with something non-deterministic? I can no longer tell someone "just google it" because I don't actually know what will come up...
  • HDBaseT 4mo ago
    Google Search hasn't been deterministic in well over a decade. Two devices searching something will never bring up the exact same results, in the exact same order.
• dev1ycan 4mo ago
  God, this is just as awful as Microsoft trying to push copilot into everything, trash.
• danjl 4mo ago
  Feels a bit like New Coke
• LocalH 4mo ago
  As long as udm=14 still works I'm fine on a personal level. It's still bullshit that they're going to push it as the default
• smoyer 4mo ago
  I think I've had this on duckduckgo for several months
• qotgalaxy 4mo ago
  [dead]
• joshspankit 4mo ago
  Google search results have been the worst part of every LLM I’ve used. I imagine the LLM specifically designed to use Google search is going to be the worst LLM.
• gverrilla 4mo ago
  First signs of the death of google.
• Topology1 4mo ago
  This might just do irreversible damage to my parents' generation. They already trust the AI overview with all of the thinking and synthesizing after making a search, and this will only make it worse.
• chairmansteve 4mo ago
  Google??? Remind me what Google is again. Haven't used them for years...
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago
  Alternative to archive.ph and "unlocked article" tracking code Works where archive.ph is blocked Text-only view-source:https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/business/google-seach-bar-ai-gemini.html Save as 1.htm Something like egrep -o "(\"text\":\"[^\"]+)|(\"textAlign\":\"LEFT\")|(\"url\":\"[^\"]+)|(\"__typename\":\"TextInline\")" 1.htm \ |sed '/\"url\":\"/{s/??.*//;s/$/\">/;s/.\{7\}/<a href=\"/;}; /\"__typename\":\"TextInline\"/{s/\"$/<\/a>/;s/.\{24\}//;}; s/\"textAlign\":\"LEFT\"/<p>/g;/\"text\":\"/s/.\{8\}//' \ |sed '1s/^/<meta charset=utf-8><meta name=viewport content=width=device-width>/' > 2.htm rm 1.htm firefox ./2.htm NB. Javascript and CSS interpreters are needed only for Datadome CAPTCHA. The following DNS data is required ct.captcha-delivery.com geo.captcha-delivery.com www.nytimes.com g1.nyt.com No other DNS data is required
• keyle 4mo ago
  AI in the 1950s Robots will do your chores so you can focus on your work AI in 2026 Robots will take your work so you can focus on your chores
• starkeeper 4mo ago
  barf but it at least opens up the playing field for new startups that want to provide good old index search and try to beat them where they left off when search still worked 8 years ago before they hired the yahoo POS execs that enshitified the service.
• dostick 4mo ago
  With answers “someone on the internet wrote”, I miss knowing definitely that there’s no good or authoritative answer to my query on the internet. With those “people as clueless as you said…” answers it takes lot more time to understand that.
• shevy-java 4mo ago
  Thankfully ublock origin blocks a ton of those useless AI slop spam, but Google nerfed its search engine already years before. They showed that they don't care about it anymore, yet alone about users. Something fundamentally changed at Google and it is not good. It is time for the world to retire Google. We don't want or need an adCompany nor an AI slop company.
• jesse_dot_id 4mo ago
  I've been using Kagi for a couple of years now. Haven't missed Google once.
• jonnyasmar 4mo ago
  I wonder how many tokens this is gonna cost Google.
• idiotsecant 4mo ago
  Lesson: slowly mean yourself off Google producrs
• max8539 4mo ago
  But they already have an AI mode tab… What is the innovation here, making it default instead of search?
• erickhill 4mo ago
  The death of Google search referrals?
• ivolimmen 4mo ago
  Even more reasons to avoid using Google. I have been a DuckDuckGo user for a few years now.
• giantfrog 4mo ago
  If Google changes the internet so that no one visits websites anymore, no one is going to make or maintain websites. And at that point, A) What is left of the internet and B) What is left for Google to summarize via AI?
  • nicbou 4mo ago
    LLM already took around 70% of my traffic. I live from that website. I don’t think it will survive another two years, and updating it already feels pointless. Why choose my words so carefully when Google will just scramble them?
• almazglaz 4mo ago
  Whatever FB is doing going to invade your privacy. Any Google product is either going to be cancelled soon or tries to further enclose internet on Google.
• karel-3d 4mo ago
  Leaving aside the user experience, how can this ve economically viable for them? Isn't inference still more expensive than normal search? (plus how do ads work?) But they do AI chat already anyway so, maybe it's fine
• siliconpotato 4mo ago
  In my dreams, this is the moment Mozilla brings a search engine out of stealth mode, and says "sorry for looking like idiots for twenty years, we were secretly working on building a great search engine that doesn't suck or do AI"
  • account42 4mo ago
    Considering their recent acquisitions that search engine would most likely be funded by ads and eventually just follow Googles footsteps in every way.
• pera 4mo ago
  This is absurd, why is Google so desperate to kill the best thing they once had? I would love to know what happens inside a corporation to destroy itself in such way. I also don't remember ever seeing anything being force-fed as much as LLMs, why?
  • wao0uuno 4mo ago
    Greed and lust for power. Judging by how most people interact with the internet these days I'm afraid Google will be fine. This is the new normal. Most people are so painfully dumb they delegate most of their thinking to ChatGPT anyway.
• delis-thumbs-7e 4mo ago
  https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/ You’re welcome.
  • sph 4mo ago
    I was previously afraid I couldn’t leave Google. Now I am afraid I will have to stick to Kagi forever if I want to search the Internet the good old way.
  • ethanhawksley 4mo ago
    I can't say enough good things about kagi, genuinely the best search engine I've tried
  • einpoklum 4mo ago
    Can you compare Kagi with DuckDuckGo? Some pros and cons?
  • romperstomper 4mo ago
    According to Wikipedia "As of April 2024, Kagi listed that its sources for search results were derived from Google, Brave Search, Mojeek and Yandex" so I suppose Google won't be available there as a source anymore? And perhaps all others in the future if they choose the same path.
• miguel-muniz 4mo ago
  We've been in a vicious cycle where advertising has gotten less lucrative for websites, so websites start pushing more ads, which makes the websites less desirable to browse, which means less traffic, and the cycle continues with more ads. It's no wonder LLMs are the new search, the user experience is much better and you get an answer that is "good enough". Now any website that doesn't feel hostile requires you to download an app, log in with an account, or sign up for a subscription. Much like how streaming has had repercussions on traditional cable, AI will have repercussions on how we traditionally expect the web to function. We've taken the open internet for granted.
• svara 4mo ago
  So they finally have become AskJeeves? On a more serious note, the on demand UI chrome could actually be cool UX, curious to try that out. I see no change to look and feel so far, has this rolled out to anyone yet?
• 3vo-ai 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• fuckinpuppers 4mo ago
  I had Google search AI summary flat out lie about something and I don't know where it even got the wrong context from. I always have to take it with a grain of salt.
• p4bl0 4mo ago
  > The goal of Search has always been simple: to help you ask anything on your mind. I fondly remember the good old times when the goal was to help you find stuff…
• rpigab 4mo ago
  AI in search is worthless to me because of how many SEO AI slop spamsites are created daily, pretending to be regular newssites and regurgitating random crap that's always the first result when you search for specific things, like a combination of two popular search terms. This when fed into another AI adds a slayer of slop, so if you don't check the source, you can't know for sure.
• peter_retief 4mo ago
  I saw this and decided it would be great for tracking my vegetable patch, when i planted seeds, when are they expected to germinate when do i need to water when will I get to harvest Watering would be based on weather conditions Did i misunderstand the concept?
• SilverSlash 4mo ago
  I really like the agentic search feature that can keep you updated. Basically an ifttt but built into google search with an LLM on top.
• RealCodingOtaku 4mo ago
  Most of all websites will lose their traffic, some already did. - People using the search console see the drop - Product owners scratch their head - Investors backing out because not having many visitors - Small bloggers adding more ads because their revenue is dropping - Sponsors backing out from their blogs because it's loosing more visitors - Small web crumbling - People google what is happening - Google says 'The "small web"—independent blogs, personal forums, and niche websites—is disappearing due to corporate consolidation, aggressive AI-driven search indexing, and high maintenance costs. These factors have pushed independent creators onto walled-garden social media apps, leaving personal websites to suffer from "link rot".'
  • acatton 4mo ago
    Don't worry about the small web. Most people running the small web don't do it for others but themselves. They don't care whether they have 5 visitors or 1 million. Visitors are just the cherry on top, my main reason for maintaining a small web page is to put down my thoughts, organize them, go back to them if I need to, and helping whichever stranger stumbles upon them along the way. The small web and indie web audience doesn't use google. They use RSS readers: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/05/rss-feeds-send-me-more-traffic-than-google/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/05/rss-feeds-send-me-more-traf... https://matduggan.com/you-can-absolutely-have-an-rss-dependent-website-in-2026/ https://matduggan.com/you-can-absolutely-have-an-rss-depende... Small web is there to stay, big tech can't do much about it: https://www.citationneeded.news/we-can-have-a-different-web/ https://www.citationneeded.news/we-can-have-a-different-web/ The only threats to small web are: * the lack of net neutrality * lack of competition in the the PC component industry which is the backbone of cheap VPSes and hosting services * browser monopoly, as any monopolistic browser could impose their small-web-unfriendly version of the web
    • RealCodingOtaku 4mo ago
      The main threat to small web is the reachability, I serve Atom and JSON feed, support microformats, microsub, and micropub, syndicate my posts to other platforms all without ads or telemetry. But all that effort means nothing if it doesn't reach the intended user base, it's just shouting at the void. We can have a small community somewhere, but people who search for niche things should find them -- which used to be search engines after the .com boom and the burst. Now we are back to the small forms again, which is lacking the reach because--- new people can't reach the forms as they can't find them in the first place. If someone new to the internet find the website, then nothing else matters.
• dekdrop 4mo ago
  What is a search engine again? People used Google so much searching for How Tos. It has turned into an answering machine.
• dankobgd 4mo ago
  maybe they should change it to actually work and not return slop shit ai crap bot site
• gertrunde 4mo ago
  Literally the first sentence: "The goal of Search has always been simple: to help you ask anything on your mind — from quick facts to the deep, complex or hyper-specific questions that can be hard to articulate." Really? My aim has always been to find a place off google that has the information that I'm looking for. If the purpose of google search is no longer aligned with what I want from the product... then maybe that tells me all I need to know. If you want a search engine... it sounds like that's not what Google is any more.
• croes 4mo ago
  So now Google is liable for the any BS the AI returns for the search
• febusravenga 4mo ago
  > always been simple: to help you ask anything on your mind No, it was to search. Search within resources that are external to Google. Like index in library. (stating the obvious). Starting article like this - that is with attempt to rewrite history - is very sad.
• notsydonia 4mo ago
  I only use Google for opening hours of stores these days and sometimes product research/cost comparison BUT yesterday I inadvertently clicked on A.I. mode and it was clearly infiltrated by undisclosed advertising. I was asking why a particular kind of tap faucet wrench wasn't available that widely - was I perhaps using the wrong term for it: suddenly Google posed the question "are you in an aisle of X (hardware store) looking for Y (tools brand) right now?" I was so annoyed I intuitively closed the tab but I probably should have continued to see how far it went. At no point was there any disclosure that it was an ad.
• motbus3 4mo ago
  Nothing like the final blow to takeover the businesses they stole all the content from.
• tpah8 4mo ago
  SEO before: let’s try to be the first search result on google SEO now: let’s try to be crawled by google so that AI can paraphrase us
• swe_dima 4mo ago
  the video on this post looked like a Tiktok - everything is jumping, I could barely grasp what was going on
• ulfw 4mo ago
  Everything in Tech is nothing but AI shit now. I know I am old but I lost all interest in tech. For me AI is a technology not a product but there is nothing else anymore
• jbb67 4mo ago
  Oh dear they made a terrible mistake right from the start. > The goal of Search has always been simple: to help you ask anything on your mind No. The goal of search is to find websites that match the text of the search term you put in. When they started to think they were "answering questions" is when google search started to become useless.
• victorkulla 4mo ago
  Google: "The goal of Search has always been simple: to help you ask anything on your mind — from quick facts to the deep, complex or hyper-specific questions that can be hard to articulate." US: The goal has always been about MONEY
• cadmeup 4mo ago
  [dead]
• einpoklum 4mo ago
  A great opportunity to stop using Google search. ... and an opportunity to try freeing yourself from Google influence more generally, by finding alternatives to their other services, like email, maps etc.
• romanovcode 4mo ago
  Just tried it: Q: What is the best summoner 0 button build for d4 s13 necro A: Something went wrong and an AI response wasn't generated. Amazing product. Really frontier search experience. Thanks Google!
• Sophira 4mo ago
  > As people have realized just how much more Search can do for them, they’re searching more than ever before — so much so that last quarter, we saw queries reach an all-time high. ...a high search volume tells me that maybe users aren't able to find what they're actually looking for, thereby needing more searches.
• XCSme 4mo ago
  Please no, I just tried Google searching for a specific popular software name, I knew exactly what it does, but I just didn't remember the name. Searching for some keywords, returned only 2 or 3 websites, the rest were just ads, AI summaries, related busineses and whatnot, after 4-5 searches I gave up. I then asked ChatGPT: "what's that software name that does X", and it gave me a list, and that software was the first one.
• daveguy 4mo ago
  PSA: kagi is a great search that still actually searches, allows you to customize results, and only uses ai when you ask for it. Only catch is that it's a pay service. Definitely worth it IMO. You can still get info directly from source sites rather than laundered through an unreliable AI. Not affiliated, just a happy user. https://kagi.com https://kagi.com
• gbanfalvi 4mo ago
  Time to start rendering junk data to all crawlers, including google.
• mehmetkose 4mo ago
  we should really consider blocking google bots now. there is 0 benefit for website owners. they forgot where they come from
• butz 4mo ago
  Google was still doing search?
• passive 4mo ago
  Made kagi.com my default new tab (which requires a chrome extension) and duckduckgo my default search.
• 1970-01-01 4mo ago
  Ripe for disruption via regression to the original, proven concept. Bing/Yahoo! and Kagi are all happy with this news.
• notsydonia 4mo ago
  Wow, I just asked Google A.I. mode some pointed questions about a site of mine which has been up and successful for about as long as Google and if Google had any guidance for creators/site owners. I had to push it but I got some remarkably frank answers and I am posting here as an FYI. "The accepted ideal case for Google is a highly consolidated, walled-garden internet where a small array of corporate media partners provide the trusted facts, while independent websites are forced to shift into closed, subscription-only communities... Tech analysts and digital economists refer to this transition as the "Siloed Web." Google's ultimate goal is no longer to help users explore the open internet; it is to keep users inside Google’s AI interface by using licensed corporate data as its foundation. By pivoting to AI Overviews and corporate licensing deals, Google is effectively dismantling its own legacy. They are turning back into the 1995 version of Yahoo—a closed ecosystem that only serves "approved" corporate data, except this time the curation is done by an AI model trained on paid datasets rather than human editors."
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  • gcr 4mo ago
    Why is this answer notable to you? Wouldn’t you be more surprised / concerned if the model refused to to criticize Google?
    • illiac786 4mo ago
      I would definitely be _less_ surprised.
    • scrame 4mo ago
      honestly? no.
• gadders 4mo ago
  Ironic those three enshittified sites in the OP complaining about Google enshittification.
• stephenr 4mo ago
  Who would have guessed they'd find something more objectionable than AMP, to fuck over site owners.
• flenserboy 4mo ago
  We need a second, new internet that cuts these rent-seekers out. The backbone is there, we can use mesh, we could use Starlink (there's a real opportunity there) — locking out & starving the current titans of cash is where we need to be. It won't happen, but it should, for all sorts of economic, cultural, & liberty-oriented reasons.
• sedatk 4mo ago
  It's hard to believe, even for me, but I've been using Kagi for years, and have used Google only a handful of times since then. I feel like Dr.Manhattan watching the chaos on Earth from my fortress on Mars. Google as a search engine feels that alien to me. Btw, Kagi has an "AI Mode" too, which can be enabled simply by ending your query with a question mark. Then, AI answers your query.
• wao0uuno 4mo ago
  If you're looking for a search engine recommendation then I'll go againt all the bots and paid shills in this thread and say: Kagi sucks. Kagi search results are very mediocre. Comparable to what DDG, Startpage and others provide for free. Even though their search results are quite unimpressive the subscription is quite expensive and comes with extra fluff like AI tools that needlessly inflate the price. Kagi sends a small part of their profits to russia by paying for yandex index. They provide support via Discord thus it's safe to say that they endorse Discord even after recent controversies. You're IT people, right? Take matters into your own hands and self host a SearXNG instance. Share it with family and friends to make yourself and everyone else harder to track and profile. Mooch off Google's infrastructure and don't give them anything in return. Fuck them. Edit: Seconds after submitting already downvoted without any reply. Tell me Kagi is not running bots on HN.
• QuantumNoodle 4mo ago
  I can't help but feel that search is a distinct action verb (separate from what they are pushing) and Google is just hijacking the place people go to search so the adoption to this new workflow is faster.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago
  I've stopped using Google for "99%" of searches Many years ago they removed search operators that allowed for exact string matching. At that point I knew it was a circus Then I noticed Google started limiting the number of results for users who are "logged out" Then, several years ago, Google disabled public access to the cache At that point it was pretty clear where this was going When they started requiring Javascript I began preparing alternatives There was a user agent string suggested by @superkuh here that avoided the Javascript "requirement" for quite a while But not too long ago that string stopped working The good news is the alternatives, all free (no Kagi), are generally working great. There are some gems I would never have found if I kept using Google There might still be some magic strings out there that can be used to avoid Google's Javascript But it's not worth the effort anymore There is still Google News and Google Scholar, no Javascript required, but I am preparing for those to be ruined eventually, too Back in the day I used scroogle.org. That was a great project while it lasted I'm thinking of trying the SERPAPI free tier since Google is suing them and they might not be around much longer Google search is story of diminishing returns
  • 1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago
    In the early days of www search engines, it was common to brag about how many pages were searched to find the delivered results Today, I don't think anyone pays attention to this anymore We know that not all searches tap into the fuil index. All the focus is on the popular searches (largest audience for advertising). To the most make money, the search engine does not need to have the most comprehensive search, www users today do not shop for search engines, it just needs to be the "default search engine". Google has that taken care of, owning and controlling the www browser and the mobile OS, paying billions to be the default in other OS and partnering with other browsers With LLMs we see companies today bragging about size. Grand claims like "the sum of all human knowledge". Also the scale of data centers and "compute" But over time, will "AI" users care. Perhaps one company's "AI" will become the most popular and the "default" LLM. It will have the largest audience And that's all that matters when the "business model" is data collection, surveillance and advertising services Nothing new to see here
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago
  Example of using the NYT URL text-only, no CSS or Javascript, no tracking code x="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/business/google-seach-bar-ai-gemini.html?unlocked_article_code=1.jlA.95yh.ptfBUHf-rBtB&smid=url-share" x=https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/business/google-seach-bar-ai-gemini.html links -source "$x" \ |egrep -o "(\"text\":\"[^}]+)|(\"textAlign\":\"LEFT\")|(\"url\":\"[^\"]+)|(\"__typename\":\"TextInline\")" \ |sed '/\"url\":\"/{s/??.*//;s/$/\">/;s/.\{7\}/<a href=\"/;}; /\"__typename\":\"TextInline\"/{s/\"$/<\/a>/;s/.\{24\}//;}; s/\"textAlign\":\"LEFT\"/<p>/g;/\"text\":\"/{s/.\{8\}//;s/\"$//;}; s/\\u002F/\//g;s/\\u0026/\&/g' \ |sed '1s/^/<meta charset=utf-8><meta name=viewport content=width=device-width>/' > 1.htm links 1.htm #firefox ./1.htm # firefox view-source:"$x" and "Save as" can be substituted for links -source