It’s going to be even shittier now. Lol
I’m just gonna plug “Kagi” here.
Kagi is a paid search engine. Yeah, sucks that we have to pay for good or decent search results, but… as the economic models of the internet change, we need to change with them. I’ve personally lost faith in freemium ad-supported websites in general.
It’s no surprise that “free” search funded through advertising led to this. The economic incentives were always going to lead us to the pay-to-win enshittification that we see today.
Paid search might look better initially, but a for-profit model will eventually lead to the same results. It might manifest differently, maybe through backroom deals they never talk about, but you’d better believe there will always be more profit to be made through such deals than through subscription fees.
Newspapers were always partially advertisement driven.
But I think everyone would agree with me that Newspapers were better when a substantial base of their $$$ came from their subscriber base.
Nothing is absolute in the world of money. There’s always additional sources of money elsewhere. From this perspective, I think we can argue that purely advertisement-driven media is what is most dangerous. Search is an important part of modern digital media, so thinking of the economic realities of funding, and how those economic incentives shape the website and future business is important.
Maybe it fails, but Kagi is trying something new. And that’s good enough as an experiment for me. I dunno, maybe I’ll revisit the idea in 5 years or so, that’s really not much money in the great scheme of things.
At very least, Kagi now has a “Fediverse search”, and now that “search-lemmy” seems to have died, I need something like Kagi to more easily search Lemmy.world and other Fediverse locations. (Google ain’t so good at this yet).
Kagi started as an AI company. and they do a bunch of weird things otherwise, which made me stop giving them money.
Nothing fundamentally wrong with AI search. I’ve found Kagi’s AI to be unobtrusive and helpful. That article is a bit of a nothingburger.
I don’t want any AI search.
Then don’t use it. The regular search is still good
I don’t need ads on Lemmy thanks
Honestly, I’ve been using Bing a lot in recent months thanks to its integrated AI. Google is now just for when I know I want a specific web page, when it’s a general answer I want then nothing beats Bing Chat. So this is a good move by Google.
It’s so funny people are downvoting this because they wish it wasn’t true
Headline fix: Google kills the one good thing it has going for it with AI
Search sucks for some time now. I’d say the best thing google offers today is Gmail - but there are plenty of arguments against that too.
Google Maps, their traffic data has no rivals, unlike gmail which has plenty of good competition. It’s the one thing I couldn’t easily replace yet.
I prefer OSM since I can use the maps offline. Google maps is useless out in the middle of nowhere without any cell service.
I tried OSM and it completely failed. Downloaded the offline region, loaded it up at home fine. Went to the location and the offline map wouldn’t load. Had a connection and tried to load an online map, nothing. Ended up right back using Google maps. I support the concept of OSM, it just doesn’t work.
Strange, it’s been very very reliable for many years, for me. Did you use OsmAnd?
No, I used solely on my phone. It worked fine at home and looked promising. When I went out 2 days later it wouldn’t load anything, was on cell only with excellent 5g data. Tried for about an hour and it just wouldn’t load a map.
Uh, but…OsmAnd is a phone app. So you’re saying you used the website on your phone’s browser, then? I’m not sure if that has an offline function, though I never used it myself. Does it say it has that function? Otherwise I think you will have to install an app, first.
Maybe you downloaded the offline map files, but had nothing to open them with. Apps use their own versions of the map files, by the way, those files you download from the website are for other use-cases.
Which makes it good for hiking, and I’ve found it’s better for bike routes too. However, I can’t easily search for places to go, there’s no recommendations, and generally you need to know the address of the place you’re going to (not just a restaurant/bar etc.).
Not to discourage usage of OSM at all, but you can absolutely download offline maps on mobile with Google Maps, they’ve just hidden it a bit. If you tap your account icon in the upper right, a menu pops up that includes offline maps, and it’ll let you select boundaries to download.
Its only car routes though, useless for footpaths and public transport
It has all the path data
Source: I just tested it
True. I wanted to replace it with OSM or similar, but my main use of Maps after navigation is exploring places, reading reviews, and browsing pictures. They have a database that is tough to replace.
their traffic data has no rivals
do you mean the waze traffic data, or does google actually have some of its own?
or does google actually have some of its own
every phone running Google’s version of Android with location enabled.
I switched away from google maps to Apple Maps a few years ago and I honestly can’t tell any difference. If google maps traffic data is better, it’s not in any noticeable kind of way for regular day to day usage.
I like most of their basic tool apps for being so basic. Notes, clock, calendar, Gmail, etc. I will lament the day they fuck all these up.
No, gmail’s Inbox is the best mail client out there!
…wait
ProtonMail is like the best if you can get if you’re a small user that regularly cleans their inbox and keeps things that matter.
I never use more than a handful of MBs, so I find 15GB of storage that GMail offers me a bit much. It’s been this way for me for years so ProtonMail does it.
Google search is still a very shitty product right now. In a blind test I would never conclude they are the market leader. It used to work a few years ago though.
Indeed. They started pushing things that make them profit before the things that you’re searching for. They love the revenue stream but are realizing now that it’s also killing their main product: googling.
But if they’re moving to AI it will probably be the same, trying to guide you into selling something instead of giving what you want. Microsoft too is trying to paper over their os with ads so you know what direction they’re going.
It’s so exhausting. Google “how to do thing” and it’s just dozens of links to webshops that sell barely related products to your search.
They don’t really have a choice. Classic website search will be useless in the near future because of the rapid rise of LLM-generated pages. Already for some searches 1 out of 3 results is generated crap.
Their only hope it’s that somehow they’ll be able to weed out LLM pages with LLM. Which is something that scientists say it’s impossible because LLMs cannot learn from LLM results so they won’t be able to reliably tell which content is good.
The fact they’re even trying this shows they’re desperate, so they will try.
So far I’m mostly unaffected by this. That’s probably because I usually internet mostly for niche hobbies and occasionally practical things and shopping. Like apartment hunting, since the industry is too spread out for anybody to get in bed with Google enough to get a big boost up the AI idiocy. Except maybe apartments.com, but that’s where I’ve always ended up anyway even back before Google’s enshitification.
If they can’t direct me to the right web site because they can’t tell what’s LLM junk, then how will they summarize an answer for me based on those same web sites they know about? It doesn’t seem like LLM summaries are a way to avoid that issue at all.
Well, it’s not exactly impossible because of that, it’s just unlikely they’ll use a discriminator for the task because great part of generated content is effectively indistinguishable from human-written content - either because the model was prompted to avoid “LLM speak”, or because the text was heavily edited. Thus they’d risk a high false positive rate.
googles search results got so bad in the last few months that i switched to a searXNG instance and couldn’t be happier at the moment. no profit incentive, so i get no-bullshit results. they can keep their SEO-infested AI garbage results.
It’s going to find 1 billion more results that all are equally as irrelevant as the 8 billion results that was initially pulled up per search.
But can it find a product that you will want to buy. That’s the real question.
How long until this takes over the api’s that metasearch engines like Duck Duck Go, Kagi, and searchxng need?
If u want ai powered search results I would recommend this tool instead: https://github.com/muntedcrocodile/Sydney
This is the best summary I could come up with:
That future is apparently here: Google is starting to roll out “AI Overviews,” previously known as the Search Generative Experience, or SGE, to users in the US and soon around the world.
Reid ticks off a list of features aimed at making that happen, all of which Google announced publicly on Tuesday at its I/O developer conference.
It’s not really beneficial to add AI.” Where she figures Gemini can be most helpful is in more complex situations, the sort of things you’d either need to do a bunch of searches for or never even go to Google for in the first place.
(You hear this one a lot in AI because it can be tricky to wade through tons of same-y listings and reviews to find something actually good.)
With Gemini, she says, “we can do things like ‘Find the best yoga or pilates studio in Boston rated over four stars within a half-hour walk of Beacon Hill.’” Maybe, she continues, you also want details on which has the best offers for first-timers.
As AI has come for search, products like Perplexity and Arc have come under scrutiny for combing and summarizing the web without directing users to the actual sources of information.
The original article contains 995 words, the summary contains 203 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Cool. Still not gonna use it though.
I noticed DDG now has AI. Damn it
Everything now has AI in it. And if it doesn’t, it soon will. Get used to it.
This is really funny to me because Google ruined their own search engine for advertising purposes; so much so that they now need to add “AI” to it to look good and hip again. Only if the “AI” results are actually good, it will hurt their advertising revenue, and it’s not quite so simple to tweak it the same way they cooked their search algorithms to serve you more ads, plus it will burn an ungodly amount of money to process each request. And if it’s bad, they’ll have wasted billions on it and will ruin their reputation even worse.
And if it’s bad, they’ll have wasted billions on it and will ruin their reputation even worse.
Ah, the Meta approach! I love to see it!
It will not hurt their revenue. There’s no way any of these companies haven’t thought about how to increase revenue with what they’re doing.
Just because we haven’t seen how yet, doesn’t mean it isn’t planned.
And it will not cost an “ungodly amount of money” to process these requests. Ofc Google will cache answers, because alot of what people ask, are the same. Then maybe the info can be updated sometimes, but ofc they won’t do it every time.
I think you have entirely too much faith in corporate executives.
Yeah, maybe. I’m just not amazed anymore how they’ll always figure out a way to screw customers over with new kind of ads.
I just think this will be the same.
Fooook google
Aaaaaaand I’m entirely out. No thanks.
We’ve leant nothing from the Terminator movies…this AI bollocks is everywhere…🤦🏻♂️
Hey Arnie(AI) became the good guy in some of the movies!
