I'm sure the model is fine, but it's not Google Search, and when I want Search I want Search. If I wanted to ask an AI, why can't I ask the one from my subscription... that I'm already paying for... that's actually good... that can also search the web?
I assume it's a play to test the waters for how the ad market is going to work, because as a product I really can't see why I would ever use it. Dropbox comment moment incoming?
They want to capture more of the value that was previously going to others. That's basically what this has all been leading to. Why let a cooking website get visitors and ad revenue when they are free to take the content and show it as their own? Now they are going to do the same to e-commerce. Either they are going to let customers buy their products through Google's interface, or they won't be discovered. No more ownership of the customer relationship. Stores will be a backend warehouse and manufacturer now with Google taking a percentage of all profits.
> Why let a cooking website get visitors and ad revenue when they are free to take the content and show it as their own?
I think this is a step beyond that - why should people be creating cooking websites when you can ask LLM how to cook given thing, while indeed, serving their own ads. It's the continuation of "we own content other people produce" policy
If you are half decent at cooking it is actually pretty helpful to explore cooking something new. Just like coding it is nice to get specific answers to your specific question and it is pretty easy to reason about the quality using your own experience.
I agree and this response was following OPs example. But the point still stands - the goal is to outsource, in a weird way, the results being served = Google as such wouldn't need to pay for content. Now, if accuracy of such sources doesn't matter (or is good enough) for casual user...
There are virtually no combinations of food which are toxic, you can mix any food with any food and, while it might not be good, it will still be food. (The only exception I know of is alcohol and mushrooms containing coprine, e.g. inky caps)
Point is, unless you're stupid enough to add glue or broken glass to your meal just because a recipe told you to, it's perfectly safe. More than just safe, LLM recipes these days are utterly boring in their normalacy, and, unlike cookbook recipes, can dynamically adapt to what you actually have in your pantry.
What really sucks is that Google pushed actual content creators out of the way in the first place. That is horrible. I think they should be challenged on this. Food bloggers, recipe writers, and creators have helped shape a huge amount of food culture, and they deserve to be protected rather than erased. If this kind of theft continues from the AI industry Im not sure what type of culture is is going to be left or what it is going to replace it to. I hope humanity is going to find a creative way around it, but I’m also aware how easy to manipulated the masses are.
Google already killed cooking websites - when it refused to show them in search unless they added long slop content to it. And it killed blogosphere when it decided blogs wont be found if they just contain content without deliberate SEO play.
And I think the rest of it will end the same way. People will be significantly less eager to do all that free work when no one will be able to find it.
You can also tell the LLM exactly what you have in the fridge or what allergies you have and get customized recipes.
It’s just a better experience, 2026 is rough for a recipe site.
I have/make rice starch glue. Can you put it on food? How are you supposed to know whether it's food safe?
Okay, so you don't trust LLM, so you go to a website instead. And... LLM-generated pages are SEO'd to get the top links. So you can't trust any website now (shoot, so much nonsense even before LLM, just more obvious to some of us). So basically everything on a computer is untrustworthy, directly from an LLM or not, unless you got yourself a copy of Encarta '97.
So you pick up a book at the local library. Librarians picked some books to order in subject matters they aren't expert in. How do you know those are accurate and safe? If the book says to use rice starch glue, how do you know the author didn't just copy that from an LLM? Or make it up?
Presumably you test some things and use common sense for others. Like if you search for "grain filling oak" using an engine like Kagi(because Google just sells you the same product repackaged over and over) then you'll get people telling you variously to buy this grain filler compound that worked on their particular project, or you get people telling you to use drywall patch compound, or watered down wood filler.
The thing is, these things do produce some kind of result that looks like what you want. But it is still up to you to test these things on a project before you rely on them for whatever it is you really wanted them for, and that requirement doesn't go away just because you sourced the information from some LLM, or a book at the library, or Nick Offerman, or whoever else.
This "common sense" you refer to, is it the same common sense Babbage was subject to?
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
This video tells me otherwise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDQds7VZkfg (
Cold Ones - We Drank AI's Horrible Cocktail Ideas). This is a tongue in cheek response though, as LLMs improved significantly since then.
Also — it's objectively a better search product to give users what they're looking for right away.
Though that's not to say they're acting altruisticly here.
Google seems to be racing toward a new dark pattern where users learn to trust rely on the AI for neutral, smart objectively correct answers — which boosts trust in its sponsored product recommendations. Super gross.
In that case at least they could point out that end users got better results with AMP than they do with news sites w/o ad blockers. The AI results are just wrong so often I don't really get it.
The results are not wrong, they are AI. Google wants that to become a distinct thing that is neither. What's a better answer for Google than one that generates more usage? If we all push in the same direction we can make AI work, we just need to accept we will need to hold its hand for a while.
It's certainly long been clear that Google is phasing out even the idea that they serve end-users "links" to other websites. They're just refining the idea and making it more and more explicit. It absolutely places them in an obviously adversarial position to every single other website on the Internet, and anyone who continues to cooperate with Google today is probably handing Google the tools to put them out of business. Unfortunately, whole generations of people have grown up learning that the safest and easiest way to navigate to a website is to type some version of the brand into their browser (which Google likely owns outright) and click the first thing Google spits back, so Google enters this battle holding most of the cards :(
Exactly! They also have been letting the results of google search get seriously degraded by ads. Would many people prefer AI over google search circa 2010?
They killed their competition and now they will give you the product that gives them the most money.
This has been their MO with their search for a decade+ now. "Native" results hiding actual search results below the fold killed many 2010s era websites that relied on search traffic.
> but it's not Google Search, and when I want Search I want Search.
Not me. I really appreciate having both results simultaneously. I can scan the first couple sentences of the AI response, and if that already has the answer then great. I can expand it to see if there's more.
Or, if I see that the AI mode didn't understand my brief search query, I just glance at the search results below.
And often times, when I do need to follow a link, I find the source result links in the AI mode to be a better quality than the search result links.
Most of the time I'm looking for something very specific that there are plenty of articles about, but clicking on the articles results in popups, banners and an unhealthy amount of scrolling to get to the answer.
AI overview provides me the answer instantly.
Think about suff like "does china borders afghanistan".
In those cases you can be confident that the AI overview is right, and saved you time.
If it is a complex or niche question I tend not to trust the overview and go straight for legitimate-looking results
The LLM results are presented confidently and succinctly in a way that is designed to tell you “yes” OR, it not applicable, it just mashes together statements (which often leads to a response that contradicts itself one sentence later). That’s not the same as your vetting search results.
Well before Google screwed it all up there used to be some correlation between top hits and what you were looking for. SEO has muddied the waters for many years now and it’s never been truly “merit based” or “objective” or whatever we want to call it, but generally speaking, the first results were the best by default.
Ok, but it’s been mine. And clearly I’m not alone.
I feel like at this point any discussion about LLM’s has an implied “my experience” because LLM’s are super inconsistent due to not being refined tools at all. I’m sure your experience has been different, just like my experience has been different. I imagine you’ll want to chalk it up to operator error, but it sure seems like a lot of people have variations of my experience. If so many people are operating it wrong, then maybe the tool is poorly designed.
Understand that I use LLM’s pretty frequently. I am not “anti-AI.” I’ve used production tools incorporating machine learning for years now. But LLM’s simply aren’t the bespoke tools that these companies want you to believe, and they are definitely not a suitable replacement for search. It’s simply too inconsistent and will hallucinate answers. Google search didn't make up answers, it presented indexed sources that you ver in real time which I find to be a far superior way to do research. I don’t like having to guess when an LLM is just making shit up as it asserts something with simulated extreme confidence. Not only that, you can take a correct answer from a LLM and just start saying “know that is not right,” and it will start apologizing to you and generating other answers. That is a huge problem! I shouldn’t be able to “convince it” to give me a different answer.
Yes SEO made things objectively worse. Doesn’t mean we need to add another layer of issues on top of that.
It replaced some of my most used tools with google search. I used to be able to search "define inoculant" and I would get a definition, synonyms, and even a history of the word usage. Now it's replaced by an often mistaken AI summary. Even "inoculant synonyms" doesn't work.
According to Google, users are adopting it. They say AI mode is the most popular feature they've ever introduced, and is driving an increase in total search queries.
>Just one year after its debut, AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users, with queries more than doubling every quarter since launch. 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.
>Another place where we’ve been rapidly innovating is in the Gemini app. Last year at I/O, the Gemini app had 400 million monthly active users. Today, we’ve surpassed 900 million, more than doubling in a year. In that same time, daily requests have grown over seven times.
Isnt this essentially just slight of hand? Google basically defaults to AI search now doesn't it? So of course it will be 'fastest adopted' it's what is shoved in peoples faces.
If the results are garbage, or people have difficulty with it... Of course number of searches goes up. That doesn't mean the product is better or its not resulting in brand damage.
These are the same folks that removed the very useful Google cache feature because people weren't using it any more. What they forgot to say is they hid the feature beforehand.
Of course they have more AI queries every day. They have full control over what goes to LLMs and what doesn't.
While I'm not opposed to the idea that Google AI mode is so good that people use it more, I also feel like the average person only have so many queries per day. Google statement would indicate that people had a number of queries that they just opted to ignore, because find the answers was to cumbersome.
I'm not entirely sure I'm buying that, unless users keep prompting the AI to reduce the amount of reading they need to do. Sort of interrogating the AI, rather than reading a Wikipedia page.
In programming forums like Hacker News people are incredibly detached from the average experience with technology, sometimes it is buffling.
Most non technical people I know asked questions to Google even before the AI overview. Instead of looking for the answer in seo-bloated articles, they find it in the overview.
I think google should improve in detecting the kind of query when I need a link that I don't remember, and deactivate the overview on those. If I search for "ryanair booking" I clearly need the url for booking a Ryanair flight, AI overview is useless
The fact that users are using more search queries means they can't find what they want with a lesser number of queries. It seems that Google's PR team doesn't have an incentive to understand that, or thinks that everyone else is stupid.
I mean, "AI Mode" is the default result when you Google something, so of course they're seeing high usage. Driving an increase in total queries is probably because instead of just Googling something and getting the right results like it was 10~ years ago, now you have to interrogate a chatbot or try multiple queries. I would think higher total queries is more an indicator that your search function isn't effective.
> Driving an increase in total queries is probably because instead of just Googling something and getting the right results like it was 10~ years ago, now you have to interrogate a chatbot or try multiple queries. I would think higher total queries is more an indicator that your search function isn't effective.
I wonder how much the search results thing is related to language and locality. I have a hunch but I haven't really dug into it.
I live in the US, I speak English, and my browser is normally chrome.
The number of times I've gone to the 2nd page in Google search results you can probably count on one hand in the last 15yr or so.
I use the standard Google search things when I want specifics... Using quotes, site:news.ycombinator.com to search a site, or add a "-" to remove results from that site. I use a "+" when needed. Nothing fancy.
When people say they can't find things in Google search, I'm genuinely baffled. I have a strong suspicion that it has something to do with the combination of browser, locality, and language. Why? Could be tons of reasons for that, some probably anti-competitive on the browser side.
I have tried to use ecosia, start page, duckduckgo, etc. Was never happy with those results and always ended up back at Google search.
I just want to know what's different, you know? I look up some pretty obscure stuff sometimes.
Note: I do normally have my Google account logged in in the browser when doing search, however I have search personalization and history turned off, so that should not be influencing the quality of my search results compared to whatever "baseline" is.
It started when Google made a hard push to improve search for everyday people. They essentially nerfed "expert google skills" to bolster "noob google skills".
Regular people are/were really bad at using google, so google moved towards showing what it thinks you want rather than what you want. They paved over the skill gap between people who understood keywords and word order, and people who just typed in a quasi legible sentence to find something. In doing so though, they killed a lot of skill that people had developed with google for years.
Basically they made the game worse for pros so it could be better for amateurs. I have never heard a non-tech person complain about google getting worse over the years, and they seem to overwhelmingly use AI overviews now too.
> they seem to overwhelmingly use AI overviews now too.
Hard agree. The only thing I've ever witnessed another person do on Google (this is only an incredibly slight exaggeration) is:
1. Type a 'query' - either a brand/website name or some kind of stream of thought like "dishwasher error 03F" (without quotes)
2. Click or look at the very top thing in the results.
This used to mean 80% of the time they'd click the top ad, 20% the top organic result. Then they started putting non-clickable "answers" in that top spot, which would always be accepted as 'the right answer'. When those appeared, approximately no one would ever click any 'blue links.' These started out pretty reliable because they were just direct extracts from sites like IMDB: "Brad Pitt is 44 years old" etc.
Now it's like 60% of the time an ad, 40% of the time their bargain-basement-model "AI Overview" slop. Either way, approximately all users always just use whatever is on top and ignore everything else.
>"a hard push to improve search for everyday people"
Citation needed. A hard push to change their search offering, sure. To improve it? Well, if by improve you mean 'require more interaction and viewing of more adverts on average before leaving' ...
Again, if you have been on HN since 2009, you are likely on the far fringe of Google's user demographics, which at this point is pretty much "The average human being on Earth".
I would bet all of my money that you never once did a Google search (pre-LLM mania, but maybe even after) that looked like
"What kind of clothing is best for when you are going hiking around the lake, so my feet don't get so cold?"
Sadly, this is how most humans have used a search engine for decades now.
How do you get the inclusion/exclusion to work? My last few attempts to use “-x” really didn’t exclude what I expected, and almost all the results had “x”. I have seen massive changes since 2005.
I find it useful, and use it almost daily. Helps answer "how to" questions for working on my house, development or just general questions. If I need more info, I just look at the links or videos which are also right there.
They probably lose a ton of traffic to AI or anticipate that happening. This is a way to keep people on Google search.
Like you, I use both search and AI separately. Even casual, nontechnical users are starting to work like that. Including AI with traditional search results will keep a lot of users from jumping ship in the first place and will help win back users from ChatGPT.
I know a lot of people hate AI - at a minimum, there’s a vocal minority - but the reality is AI is eating search like nothing we’ve ever seen.
I think it's a multifold problem and they've chosen bad solutions.
1. To protect ad revenue they make search results worse to increase the number of searches by making people refine their searches. This made people upset because search result quality went down.
2. "AI everywhere!" put them in a panic, so they shoved am LLM into results, hoping it could pick through bad results and give good data to the user.
3. LLMs are expensive to run, so they're using a cheap model.
Cheap model + bad results = abysmal user experience.
There are too many groups with opposed interests fighting. Ad groups wants worse results so people search more (not realizing this just drives users away). Search groups want a better product so they stop losing users, and the AI group is being given a bad name because management is using their worst AI product on search. So the whole experience is just garbage.
>1. To protect ad revenue they make search results worse to increase the number of searches by making people refine their searches. This made people upset because search result quality went down.
Why would this work? Were yahoo and askjeeves sandbagging their results too just so they can get more clicks?
Humans are predictable and hate change. For a short while it DOES work, people are used to great results, assume they're not using the the best keywords, and they'll reformulate their searches. For a while. After a while of all searches being not as good as they used to be, people start looking for other alternatives, which is why DDG is seeing an uptick.
It's called enshittification. It's easier than improving a product.
> Were yahoo and askjeeves sandbagging their results too just so they can get more clicks?
I don't know how much control Goog has over Youtube despite owning them but I do note in passing they removed dislikes, removed upload dates (apparently?), removed 5 stars. Easier to trick people into ads
The platform has been various kinds of hostile for a few years now
Slight digression: Claude/ChatGPT/etc all can search the web, but Google's AI already has a local copy of the web. It's much faster because of Google's TPUs, but also because Google has a copy of almost the entire web available locally. I recall others testing this and they observe that Google doesn't actually make HTTP requests to sites it references. It just uses its local cache. That's an advantage that all others seem to lack.
Of course, I agree that when I want search, I want search. But personally I've found if I want an LLM to very quickly answer a simple question, the type of thing all of them would do an equally good job on, I prefer Google's for its sheer speed.
Maybe we use search differently, but I very often don't just want an answer, I want to find a website to help me. Maybe it is because I need to do business with a company and need to find their website to interact with them, or maybe I saw a cool site awhile ago that's relevant to what I'm doing now and didn't bookmark it (because I dropped that habit when Google search was good), or want to read the official documentation about a product I bought, that someone already put a lot of effort into making complete enough and digestible to a wide audience... and the LLM responses tend to get in the way.
Like the parent I use good/paid AI when I want an AI response. So, yeah, an omnibox that knows when I want "an answer" and one that knows when I want to find a thing sounds slightly more convenient than switching between two tools, but Google search is not that Omnibox.
I dont think about less keypresses though - google search would let you type two words and get the thing you know you want, an ai search doesn't really fit the mode that old school search folks were using
You really want to read the author's life story when searching for a recipe? Or wade through some content marketing plug for some vacuum cleaner shop in Albuquerque when all you want to do is figure out how to change filters on your vacuum? There are definitely gems on the web out there, but chances are I'm not discovering them via search, and I'd rather get the straight answer from the AI.
I thought the same at first, but now I find myself relying on the AI answer (as it is usually reliable) and, also more and more, I continue interacting in the AI mode on the topic that motivated my search in the first place.
I don't disagree with you, but google search has gone so downhill that I had stopped using it before they moved to the AI approach, which is actually pretty decent.
They see AI killing the incentive for anyone to produce human-generated content so they're squeezing the last few bucks out of the internet as we know it before it finally goes belly-up.
My read on it is "AI is taking over internet content generation, and we can't filter because we'll end up filtering everything that makes us the most money"
I imagine most people aren't actually searching the web these days. They're searching for an answer to a question. They already now the 5-10 websites they use and go to those directly. They're mostly living in walled gardens, streaming services, or Amazon. When they use Google they want an answer and AI provides that.
...and it really hasn't been for a good number of years now. I left a while ago when results were all SEO copy pasta blogs this is just a final nail in the coffin.
Soon, the internet will be so completely full of AI crap enabled by the mega corps that search will be quite a bit less relevant anywho. Maybe google is trying to front run the demise of the internet that they were supposed to protect?
The intention is to kill the web in its current form, obviously. If only 1/3 of their users have left, then it is still a win for them in the long run, as they will gain the fraction of content they directly supply to users. Singularity is here and it's spreading faster than a cancer.
Because Google wants to kill off its search engine here. It is very clear.
> I assume it's a play to test the waters for how the ad market is going to work, because as a product I really can't see why I would ever use it. Dropbox comment moment incoming?
This assumes that Google search is still a high priority for Google. With their privatized adNetwork, they are trying to get people to trust them, and abuse users
via their ads. That is their business model. Google is an adCompany. It stopped being a tech company many years ago already.
Also they control the adMarket for the most part. Just look at youtube.
My friends who previously had no interest in technology and never talked about it, are suddenly following tech news closely all because they hate AI being pushed so hard. One was just messaging me this morning about alternatives to Google search and maps. He ended up downloading DuckDuckGo.
If Google isn’t carefully they’re going to push people away from their golden goose.
The AI product rollouts in the last two years have been some of the most aggressive and user hostile product rollouts in my entire life.
All conventions and user centricity go out the window with AI feature launches lately. If you look at examples from the last week it’s stuff like posthogs opt-out training, Copilot training, or Google’s antigravity chat-app switch.
I’ve had the worst customer experiences of my life in the last few months.
My health insurance company decided calling support meant I consented to them saving my voice for model training. They said you can opt-out online, but that option didn’t exist in app or on their website. It was only after calling back and threatening to sue that they added an option to opt-out.
This is the daily experience now. Seemingly every company is opting you into selling your data, breaking your workflows, disabling features you use, and force installing AI integrations you have to fight to remove. And several companies are perfectly fine to reenable or reinstall them after removal.
It should be no surprise to anyone people are mad.
What real value AI does have has been poisoned by premature rollouts (training users it’s crap) and forcing it on people too aggressively.
After-the-fact opt-outs are something I never trust. Most data selling is opt-in and requires the user to opt-out. It seems to me that when I submit the form, the data would be instantly sold and by the time I get to the opt-out form it’s too late.
If this isn’t how it works, I’d be interested to know. The whole idea of these opt-outs seem like smoke and mirrors to act good while still gaining the advantage from the dark pattern. The only way to truly opt-out is to not register or use a service at all. There really needs to be legislation around this.
Search is not the golden goose. Ads are. If search was the golden goose, they wouldn't be trying so hard to replace it with AI.
Just because Google used to do search as their main point of business does not mean that holds true today. Holding on to the false premise will only add to your confusion about their decisions.
Ads in Search make up a significant percentage of their revenue. It is also the gateway that gets people into the Google ecosystem.
Ads make the money, but Search is still the consumer facing product that brings people to Google and keeps them there. It’s so ubiquitous people don’t even think about it or notice it anymore.
I’m always surprised by how much people are still searching for stuff as we’ve moved from the open web to various platforms (Amazon, TikTok, Facebook, etc), but every time I see Google’s revenue breakdown I’m shocked by just how important Search still is to their business.
This is from 2024, but shows Search accounting for nearly 57% of revenue. Yes, this is made possible by the AdWords business, but without Search, that 57% goes away, unless that traffic goes to a 3rd party that is also using AdWords and Google were to make the same from 3rd party ads as 1st party. I find that doubtful.
> It’s so ubiquitous people don’t even think about it or notice it anymore.
Which is kind of the scary hazard for Google. They made people notice search by their announcements. They drew attention to the thing people took for granted as just how things work. People suddenly have a reason to look critically at it. Google has to hope to god the attention they receive back is actually positive.
The main reason Google loved search was because it was the primary way they got your personal info. Now Chrome gives Googles your entire browsing history, Gmail lets them read your email, youtube tells them what you're interested in, android gives google your entire life offline and suddenly the only thing google search is good for is as just one more website pushing google ads.
AI is going to be great at pushing ads. Plus AI trains you to give google even more control. Instead of just presenting you with a list of websites offering different perspectives and opinions on something, Google can just tell you what they want you to know/think (or not tell you anything they'd rather you not know/think about). The more you get used to treating google like an oracle instead of a librarian the easier it will be to manipulate you.
They only dominate Ads because they dominate search if everyone leaves Search the ad business grinds to a halt as well. These are the ying and yang of Google.
Kind of. They dominate ads because the dominated search when they bought the successful ads company. By that point in time, they already had your profile built, and the further use of search just continues to enhance that profile. But now that ads has its own persistent tracking that dependence on search is not as strong as it used to be
People have reported a decrease in ROI from spending on Google ads already when they no longer control all the eyes and where you rank in what those eyes see when they search, that ROI will drop even more. People will stop paying for Google ads when the ROI is higher on other platforms.
Couple that with the fact that a lot of folks have moved their search to GPT or Claude once those platforms start taking in ad money... that budget will come from somewhere and that's likely existing Google ad buy dollars shifting.
> My friends who previously had no interest in technology and never talked about it, are suddenly following tech news closely all because they hate AI being pushed so hard.
My friends who previously had no interest in technology and never talked about it, are suddenly following tech news closely all because they have fear of missing out on AI :(
That's been my experience too, both with friends and coworkers.
It would seem that the negative sentiment around AI is largely an internet phenomenon. I've yet to run into a hardcore "AI skeptic" irl. People seem either neutral, or enthusiastic about it.
Perhaps they are, but I think what I think is odd is how many are simultaneously opposed to the effects of AI (data centers, environmental impact, job loss) yet also are daily, paying users of it even outside of work. I know several who are like that.
I wonder how many in that poll have a negative sentiment about AI, yet are also heavy users. There seems to be some kind of disconnect going on?
Meanwhile I've never run into anyone who actually likes AI in any form (except for my boss). Most people who dislike it aren't bringing it up at random. I'm sure it has to do with the circles you interact with and their demographics.
I'm in my 50s and all my friends and family hate AI. My parents in their 70s can't really comprehend it. They got used to search and want nothing to do with AI. Some company is trying to build an AI data center where they live, and they're livid about it.
Personally, I like it sometimes, but I'm a techie and understand the limitations, and I dislike not being given options to use or not use it.
That’s what I told him… just set Safari to use it in Settings, but it seemed like he had already done it and was now invested in using a whole new app just to switch search engines. This is a symptom of the app-based model people now think in.
I think this is very true. They probably got scared of the almost 1b weekly active users of ChatGPT, and how people would rather ask ChatGPT than use Google. It will be a balance but this is a great opportunity for smaller search engines to make a real comeback.
It can be set as the default search engine in Safari, one of the few options Apple gives for search engines. No need to change your home page. I told my friend this as well, but I think that idea was slightly beyond his current mental model of how things work on the phone.
I’ve tried using the homepage method before with Kagi, as the extension to set it as the default search is a pretty ugly hack. I found it created too much friction, as I’m often searching from an existing page.
Google has 90% market share. DDG has 0.7%. I don't have a POV on whether AI mode is good or not, but surely there's gonna be some people who dislike it, and even if that's a tiny percentage, it can be a huge boost to DDG.
A large fraction of the people using Google probably have no idea DDG exists. So the backlash is likely significantly larger than just the 0.2% who left to this search engine.
I actually like AI mode in Google. My main reason is if I just have a quick question it seems a lot quicker than logging into ChatGPT/Claude as I can just type it in the address bar.
Of course DDG / others can do the exact same thing as they already have an AI mode. Maybe you can even set up ChatGPT as a search engine - not sure. The key for this use case is speed - it has to be nearly instant.
Kagi does this really nicely, you just add a question mark at the end and it'll add on top of the search results an LLM summary of what's been found. It's subpar in quality but more than enough to aggregate the results by theme
Yeah you'd need to support it in the term itself. So many queries coming from the url bar. As opposed to a toggle or something. I wonder if we have info on that - what percentage is input in address bar vs google homepage/app.
The problem is that's not discoverable though. The toggle on google.com would be nice but most people probably arent searching that way.
>I actually like AI mode in Google. My main reason is if I just have a quick question it seems a lot quicker than logging into ChatGPT/Claude as I can just type it in the address bar.
This is the exact use-case, and it makes a lot of sense. The hard part for Google is identifying when someone wants search and when someone wants an AI response. It's somewhat identifiable by the input but of course thats extremely messy to determine systematically.
They are already doing something like that though. It's not just a ? mark, but they are getting some signal from the input and classifying it as a search term or AI prompt. Not all inputs have an AI response.
And a "?" at the end is not going to capture a lot of real LLM prompts like "What should I pack for my vaction? Im going to Florida in September."
I mean you could do something like this. But it's really not much different than other manual search codes that are used by more power users like like "", "site:" etc.
They probably have a term for it but their AI response is just another "embedded result" for lack of a better term. Like displaying the local weather directly at the top when you search "weather", etc.
If you use Firefox, then you can add chatgpt as a search engine with keyword gpt. Then you can type "gpt how to centre a div" into your address bar and get the same thing without routing it through Kagi, or needing Kagi.
I'm as anti-Google as anyone out there. I block all their ads, refuse to pay for youtube, go out of my way to avoid their hardware, etc. But I have to admit AI mode is great. It's fast, free, not yet cluttered with ads, and useful. I treat it as a search engine that does a fuzzy search rather than the more literal text match search that we're used to.
I recently bought a Bambu 3d printer after Reddit/HN drew my attention to them and AI mode has been really useful for me to learn about my new printer and troubleshoot things. There is so much information and I don't have time to read everything. I just want to ask a targeted question and have something summarize the literature's answers for it.
It will be a sad day when Google inevitably enshittifies it, but for now I'm happy for them to subsidize my expensive LLM queries.
I'm the same way, I hate using Google search for searching because it's basically useless, and their other ecosystem offerings generally get enshittified over time so it's not worth paying for or relying on.
But if they're letting me using AI for free without logging in and I just need a dumb AI slop answer, then I'm more than happy to burn their tokens instead of my own. Any serious work goes to a different LLM provider. The switching cost for moving to a different LLM provider in the future is practically zero.
"Surely the last time after handing out carrots long enough to kill all competition, they switched from carrots to sticks, that sucks; but look? now they started giving out carrots again!! It will be such a sad day when no more carrots"
“Someone’s handing out free carrots but it may be sticks someday so I’m gonna be mad about it today and grow my own carrots. That’ll show ‘em! My neighbor’s roasted carrots sure do smell good though.”
> Just for a start, visits to its AI-free search page noai.duckduckgo.com between May 20 to May 25 are said to have increased by 22.7% on average week-on-week, with the figures peaking May 24 at 27.7%.
> The DuckDuckGo mobile app saw installs spike in the US by 18.1% on average compared to the previous week. TechCrunch reported this growth was sustained over six days, peaking at 30.5% on May 25. An even greater number of iOS users hit download on the app though, with installs seeing an average week-on-week growth of 33% and a peak of 69.9%.
Why do they report only relative numbers? These numbers alone are meaningless. This is just lazy reporting.
They wanted to write a story where this was a negative consequence for Google, I suspect, but the absolute numbers wouldn’t have supported that (they mention that it is inconsequential to Google a couple paragraphs in, if your browser can sustain the site for that long. Mine had trouble).
They used to have public-facing relative figures located on /traffic, but it looks like they got rid of that page some years back and now it just redirects to the homepage.
Because it's an ad for DuckDuckGo and PCGamer loves anti-AI engagement bait outrage articles because they bring clicks from outraged "gamers" and this brings them ad revenue, too so you are reading an ad for an ad.
...because the absolute numbers are incredibly low. And I say this as a fan of DDG! It's just the reality we live in; those who are negatively polarized against AI enough to make this sort of change are just very small in number.
noai.duckduckgo.com probably receives much less traffic than the main domain, which enjoys placement in many prominent browsers (and offers AI overviews by default, although they are far smaller and less likely to appear than on Google). It would be much more interesting to see absolute numbers... in the context of the main site.
That's users changing products in advance of a change, which is a relatively uncommon thing. We'll presumably see another bump when Google actually rolls out their changes.
Yeah, starting from a much lower baseline than DDG, I've had something like a 10x increase in queries last ~week. Seems like a lot of people are looking for alternatives.
For as much as how the startup space loves to pay lip service to contrarian bets, people sure do all be running in the same direction.
I use DDG but the problem I have with it is that, well, the results just kind of suck. I have slowly used the "!g" operator more and more over the years to the point that now probably 95% of my DDG searches are just Google searches.
Makes sense to me. When I use Google, I am interested in getting the information quickly and in the right length and format, and am not interested in navigating to particular page(s) and looking up that info myself. Perhaps this will impact Adwords revenue in the long run but Google will find a way out. If Google didn't have AI mode, I would've stopped using it completely.
The world seems to be fragmenting, into those that see the value in the latest from Google, and those that resist changes like this. I search for how much oil does my <ICE vehicle> take" and get the exact answer in a single sentence, or I suppose I could click the links and wade through all the validation for choosing <ICE vehicle> and how often one should change the oil, and which brand of oil that blog is pushing etc etc.
I love Google's AI answers and their AI Mode tab. DDG is just Bing or a search vendor proxy, so I've never understood the fascination. At least Perplexity is different to Google. DDG seeing a 28% increase is like Google saying they saw a drop of 0.0000000001% in traffic.
HN crowd forget that the world isn't like us, they didn't grow up with Yahoo and Alta Vista, with Excite etc etc. Our SOP is to resist all change, anytime Apple brings out a new version it'll be the end of Apple according to HN - Apple - the biggest company in the world - what do they know about UI, "Liquid Glass sucks!" :) :)
We're a community in danger of pushing out those new to the tech world, recent graduates will be made to feel unwelcome if we continue to trash everything that the biggest companies in the world do, like we always know better. I implore the community to be more positive about the future, about the technologies that will take us into that future.
> I search for how much oil does my <ICE vehicle> take" and get the exact answer in a single sentence, or I suppose I could click the links and wade through all the validation for choosing <ICE vehicle> and how often one should change the oil, and which brand of oil that blog is pushing etc etc.
Don't you have to do that _anyway_? Unless you're just blindly trusting the AI to be correct, and if that's the case, please do enjoy gluing your cheese to your pizza.
Yeah, but perhaps we're getting to the point where the AI synthesis of all reachable data sources is going to be more truthy than trusting whatever random anonymous result you pick from the top half of the results page.
I'm also finding that the AI-cited links are often more helpful and authoritative than the top search results.
I like having a direct answer to my question "how much oil does my engine take" but as of today I do not trust the answer to be correct, so I still cross check several sources, ideally ones that appear to be authoritative.
I asked claude to dig up the current Ford Bulletin for the engine in my truck to tell me the recommended motor oil. And it found the updated recommendations properly. I wouldn't trust google AI because I know specifically that the recommendations changed, and I don't want whatever the published specs were when the engine was first manufactured, which is out of date (and found on lots of low quality blogs). I don't even trust claude, but it gave me the URL to click on to verify and summarized it well enough that I mostly trusted that it wasn't using the cited technical bulletin and not a bunch of random AI-slop web pages.
I wouldn't trust any 'confident stochastic next-word predictor' to tell me fact. There are official sources of information for these kinds of car maintenance questions.
Better than asking your backyard mechanic buddy who believes that you don't need anything other than 10W40 or something like that. You have always had to know who to trust and what level of work you need to do in order to get to an answer which is satisfactory. And in this case, Claude cited the manufacturer's bulletin which is the actual best source of truth that you're talking about.
Being critical about AI companies isn't what's pushing new people away from the tech world. The AI companies and the consequences of their actions are, as well as comments like this pretending the issues don't exist and that we need to just be positive about the "future".
And supposing these technologies do take us into the future: when said future is bleak and worse in most ways than what came before, people aren't going to be encouraged or enthusiastic about the tech world.
> search for how much oil does my <ICE vehicle> take" and get the exact answer in a single sentence
How do you know the answer is exact?
> or I suppose I could click the links and wade through all the validation for choosing <ICE vehicle> and how often one should change the oil, and which brand of oil that blog is pushing etc etc.
Where do you think that "exact answer" is being scraped and averaged-out from?
Are you going to enjoy a future where those different sources can't be found, so now Google requires you to have a subscription that includes data about vehicle repair? The great thing about the web before was that the information was available for everyone, it was decentralized. This is what they are trying to kill.
You're entitled to your opinion. But "we should embrace the stuff big tech is doing" does not follow from "let's be welcoming to new entrants to the field". They are, of course, welcome to their opinions as well. But even if they and I disagree on things, that doesn't make them unwelcome. So no, I'm not going to embrace the slop Google is putting out based on a spurious concern over welcoming newcomers.
I switched to DDG about a year ago and it works fine for me. For some queries, Google still surfaces better results, but DDG is good enough that I don't really miss it.
The only Google service I haven't been able to replace is YouTube - no real alternative. I still use Google Maps as well, but could probably switch to Apple maps without missing much. For hiking trails, Apple Maps has often been superior. I briefly tried OpenStreetMaps years ago, but the lack of traffic data and the fact that it gave me bad directions made it untenable.
I wonder if the 28% more visits was mostly among existing users. I skimmed the article and it didn't look like this was broken out. It would be much more impactful/impressive if they brought in a bunch of new users, as opposed to ratcheting up usage among people who were already aware of it.
From my experience the Google AI mode is more restrictive on what it will let you search for and the content it produces.
I personally have had to use DuckDuckGo to search for things that Gemini finds to be against its instructions to answer.
And I'm not talking about things that are NSFW, but some things that Gemini just doesn't want to discuss.
That's kinda Gemini's problem in general, it just is overly restrictive and doesn't like to talk about anything things that Claude will freely talk about and push against and discuss with you.
I direct a lot of questions to LLMs, but I want to ask a high-quality model, not the crappy one that Google uses to answer queries. If I'm typing something into Google, it's because I want a search result, not an LLM answer.
I've actually changed that. When I type something into Google it's because I want an LLM answer - their search results have been useless for a while now. But that's only because I rarely use Google these days. I'm mostly using DDG to search (I might try Kagi at some point). Google is relegated to my phone when I want a quick answer where accuracy isn't critical without needing to scroll through a bunch of search results/open and read websites on a small screen.
Kagi, unfortunately, is getting worse too. I think mainly because they don’t get access. But I’m not sure. I had to fallback more and more to Google, because Kagi couldn’t find exact matches, while Google could. Like texts which I copied from a webpage (for example from Android’s source), and it can’t find it.
Its search results ordering is quite good, but the accessible information for them seems to be shrinking. And quickly.
I’m at the point where I don’t search for complex things anymore. I use Kagi for things which can be found with any search engines. Not because I chose it, but because I was forced. This was not the case a few years back, when I started to use it.
Btw, there was one thing with which Google was superior all along: define <word>. And they fucking killed it in the past months, for a far, far worse solution. Nothing comes even close.
I do have to say, and this is from recent observations, not outdated ones, but their AI summaries get things wrong, alot, and these are things that gemini (proper), Claude, or ChatGPT subscription AI's don't get wrong.
If I'm typing something into a google it's usually so I can be hit with a Captcha on my home internet connection and then get search results that aren't even any better than DDG. And DDG has a LLM as well.
You've got the captcha issue as well? Seems like it's happening constantly now. I suspect Apple Private Relay has something to do with it, but I'm not sure.
If Claude starts sending queries to Google then Google makes you use captcha from that IP, likely you have been using such a bot and it sent queries without you knowing.
I switched away from Google to Duck a few years back. But I observed that I mostly do !g and end up on Google. I read similar comments from many others on other threads.
Recently I switched to Kagi and has been a very happy customer. I never visited Google after that. Only downside is the Search on mobile. You have to install an app and enable it as extension on safari. Logging in never worked and couldn't enable my premium Kagi on iPhone.
Google is better than Duck's backend (Bing or Yahoo, IIRC)
However, I find that most of my queries don't require Google to find the result. Maybe once every couple days I do a search, don't like the results, and then add a "!g". Most of the time it's fine and I get to avoid Google's ecosystem.
Yeah, same. Switched my default to Duck about a year back although I've still got Google on mobile (something I only just clocked as I type).
Google search had degraded so badly pre-AI, I was already finding it equivalent for most things. The odd few searches benefit from Google, but nowhere near enough to warrant them as a default.
I like the AI mode, but only because Google intentionally destroyed their search engine. There wasn't any real competition back then, but now everyone has access to AI. They're frantically trying to keep their search engine customers.
For the search, some of the local results are wrong but I live in a very small area so it may be more reliable for highly populated areas. Lately I've been checking out Kagi for a few things just to see what the quality is like on competition. The anonymized chat (proxy) for AI is cool but very small context limit. Good for looking up random questions and they typically include references.
I rarely use Google for search, but I've actually gone back a few times just to use the AI search function. Occasionally it is useful, especially when I can't think of the correct term to search for.
But recently I had an entertaining experience with it. I was trying to apply a math technique to an application it wasn't normally used for, and I figured that somewhere out there was a paper or two explaining how to do what I was attempting. So, I tried Googling, and the response was something like:
"You appear to be working with two completely different areas of mathematics, which have absolutely no connections between them. That's fascinating! Would you like to know more about either of these two completely separated subjects which have nothing to do with each other?"
Not useful, Google, but definitely good for a laugh.
I read it because it's shown before search results now but I have to stop myself to not accidentally rely on it. Had two times it misinformed me pretty blatantly and its links to sources are wrong a lot.
I'm not sure why people go with DuckDuckGo as their engine as it's just trading Google for Bing. After learning about their deal with Microsoft, I started using Brave Search instead.
It's also pretty ironic for people to ditch Google over ai just to move to another search engine that has AI by default unless you happen to know about the noai subdomain. But it is good that people are willing to break the habit and try alternatives. That's what Google should be scared of.
Wait, Duck Duck Go has some 50 million MAUs and that went to 65 million MAUs or so. Google has 5 billion MAUs, so some 15/5000 users went to Duck Duck Go. That doesn't seem damning. 99.97% of Google users didn't go to DDG.
I've been using it a lot in recent months, even though I was very critical about this in the past.
Of course, asking it to give yes/no answers or specific numbers is asking for trouble, but finally I can let something else read the SEOed garbage, point me in the right direction and let me browse the search results in a much more pleasant way than before.
The same people who told you Google was going to zero three years ago because Search would become irrelevant are now telling you users will move away from Google because it’s removing Search.
When will people learn that the quality of Google’s leadership is better than that of the average Joe on Hacker News or a random tech journalist writing clickbait articles?
It's the french open. There's always been a bug with google search where sometimes I have to search 'french open' or 'australian open' twice to get it to give me the google scores. That bug still exists, sometimes it just brings up the site, but now it will also sometimes just go into AI mode and it will refuse to get out of it. Like even when you click for otherwise, it will force its way back.
The google live scores is a great feature. But when it's not coming up, even googling "french open google live scores" doesn't just bring it up every single time. It might if you try, but try multiple times over the day...
I'm in these stats I think. But mostly because I was trying to do an exact search ("something to search") and discovered that google just ignores it.
There's a local search engine with a motto that translates to something like "Find what you don't know." Google has seemingly adapted "find what you don't want."
I dislike the AI summaries always popping up. I do now see an AI mode button. But so far I am not forced into AI mode. Is this happening for other people?
I'm seeing the same increased activity around my search engine project (https://github.com/asciimoo/hister). While Google's decision is very controversial, it's good to see that people are seeking for alternatives - nice motivation boost to keep developing alternative search projects.
... DDG had .7% marketshare (https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share). 28% more visits would take it to .84%. Assuming those all come from Google, that would mean .16% of Google users didn't love AI mode enough to switch.
Well... it is still a huge relative increase. And who knows where it could lead them, if they can sustain that sort of growth on a weekly basis...compounding and all...
Oh thank God, I am not the only one here, I mean idk why but I am still not so comfortable with AI mode,and I just need Search, like good old search. I feel this all started when people were saying things like google search is dead or gpt will take over..
Duckduckgo is blocked in my country. Reddit is blocked in my country. My country is also one of first countries agree to ban free (non playstore) android app installation. My country is so against freedom. What a shitty country.
As someone who has been driving DDG for the past 6 years, i have switched to Google back due to the new AI mode,, its such a nice quick way to check information and validate ideas.. no friction included.
AI snippets are just terrible, I always just scroll past it. I want to find the website I'm looking for, if I wanted to use AI I'd open up an AI app or website.
If you want to use DDG then go for it. Let people enjoy things, I say. But let's not pretend DDG is suddenly surging, or even relevant really. It's a niche service largely for virtue-signaling by people who insist that "Google sucks". That's their core demographic.
Some Googling claims DDG gets 145M searches per day and claims Google gets ~14B. Well, 14B translates to ~162k QPS. I know for a fact that Google's traffic is significantly higher than that so I'm not sure where that claim comes from.
I honeslty don't believe a significant percentage of Google users even know Sundar made a statement about people loving AI mode or would even care, one way or the other. This is just more marketing fluff trying to will DDG growth into existence.
I am trying to find a replacement for google search.
DuckDuckGo was also useless. Qwant just copy/pastes Google's awful UI.
We kind of see that all search engines suck now, but in many cases there
is no real reason why that should be the case. For instance, why did Qwant
copy/paste Google's horrible UI? There is no logical reason for this other
than trying to bait in people who like the Google search UI. I don't like
that UI Google chose since like 10 years or more; Google ruined its search
engine already way before AI.
We really need a search engine that works and isn't control by a greedy,
Evil adCompany. DDG isn't the answer; neither is Qwant.
This has been my issue with DuckDuckGo from the start... it needs to be something a little more catchy and that rolls off the tongue. Saying "I'll DuckDuckGo it" feels so clunky.
As small of a gripe as it sounds like, it really does matter.
I'll have to see Google's stats as well. I went the other way leaving DDG for google AI mode. I use ddg still if I just want it to find a site. if I want answers, I use Google.
I would say it's more than visits that count, how many people are staying in the DDG or Google home page doing things? a lot more with Google I'd think. they've succeeded in trapping me in their product, instead of navigating away, and I'm happier for it. And... i still don't get what people's problem is (quality wise that is), you don't have to use AI results right, and it's pretty obvious what the AI interaction portion of the page is? I'm sure ad blocker extensions can remove it entirely as well. DDG's quality is not just lower, it requires me clicking around to get AI assisted summary.
I just don't get it, is people's time not valuable? even if half the time the AI results are wrong, it offsets (for me - and it's more like 5%) the time I waste clicking on random sites, some of them ad-trodden (where a blocker isn't available), outdated,etc.. and I usually don't even go to the second page of the result where as the AI reviews more than the first page or two to give me a summary. I'm saving lots and lots of time, getting more done with it.
This is tech, not religion, but it feels like people are conflating the two. it's just a tool that's used to search things.
Google is the OG of enshittification. When DoubleClick bought Google, I mean when Google bought DoubleClick, that is when Google started printing money in exchange for a terrible user experience.
Google bought DoubleClick in 2008. That's nearly 20 years back. Either you're suggesting Google Search has been bad for 20 years, or you're just being willfully ignorant.
AI summary isn't bad at all, but people don't understand it and Google hasn't explained it very well. It is just RAG. It is a summarization of the documents that are on the first page of the SERP. People think it is answering their question independently, but that's not what it does. It takes the docs that are top ranked from web search and digests them.
The corresponding "AI overview" feature of Gmail is amazing. It digests the messages that match your search. Because it is using your own docs, the output is way better. Or, at least, mine is. Maybe your inbox is full of lies but mine isn't.
People understand it. They dislike it. Users want what they want. When Software companies purport to know better... they do themselves and their customers a disservice.
Why do you need an off switch, are your eyes and fingers not able too coordinate scrolling down past the already half collapsed ai overview section? does it offend you at a spiritual level to see it?