If you’re in the US, you might see a new shaded section at the top of your Google Search results with a summary answering your inquiry, along with links for more information. That section, generated by Google’s generative AI technology, used to appear only if you’ve opted into the Search Generative Experience(SGE) in the Search Labs platform. Now, according to Search Engine Land, Google has started adding the experience on a “subset of queries, on a small percentage of search traffic in the US.” And that is why you could be getting Google’s experimental AI-generated section even if you haven’t switched it on.
Google Search was so good when it came out. Complete polar opposite to the cluttered and bloated Yahoo Search. Haven’t really using it for years now because the search results became worse and worse, especially when that rounded edge theme came along.
No clutter, meant faster loading time, and that was important at the time. Nowadays, you can just type the search query to the address bar, but that wasn’t available back then. Initially, you didn’t even have one of those extra toolbars with a little search box, so loading the search page was the only way. If you do like 50 searches a day, those seconds spent on waiting the page to load really begin to add up.
All the talk about how much computing power and electricity AI uses, and then Google and Bing just run it for every (most? many? some?) search.
Isn’t it the training of the models which is the most energy intensive? whereas generating some text in answer to a question is probably not super intensive. Caveat: I know nothing
Yes training is the most expensive but it’s still an additional trillion or so floating point operations per generated token of output. That’s not nothing computationally.
oh that’s that same shit that bing does that ends up filling the top quarter of my search results page with useless chatGPT garbage that doesn’t help my search query (both my employer and my school have forced edge+bing as the standard browser and it makes me want to die)
As someone in IT I get an employer enforcing Edge (I don’t do that, but I understand why an IT department might), but why would anyone enforce a specific search engine? That seems bonkers to me.
Well, it’s the system default, and while you can change it during each session or manually browse to Google/DDG if you want, it will always reset the next time you log in… I am incredibly lazy and 99% of the time will smash my super quick search into the omnibar and end up stuck with it until I eventually get mad enough at Bing to force keep a tab open with Google.
Normal search results are already littered with useless ai generated seo optimized crap. It’s got to the point where sometimes it’s quicker to learn the knowledge you seek the old fashion way: by reading books.
Enshitification must lose.
🤓 Well you see actually we trained all our models off all historical text written by humans so it will be more human and you don’t have to read again
Ive seen akin to this sentiment online and its very baffling
Oh, they trained their ais off of that all right… And then filtered out all the stuff they didn’t like such as useful information.
I’ll be looking for a uBlockOrigin filter when it hits for me
I try to avoid google search when I can, but this should solve the problem for the rest of the time
I wish that was the case but sadly most of them are basically Bing or Google frontends or belong to entities that I trust even less. As far as I can tell there are very few independent crawls out there.
Kagi has been doing a decent job for me, with the downside that it’s paid, and does use results from other places.
They go into detail about how they work, but it’s them paying for results from lots of engines, plus their own engine, then heavy duty filtering of the results.
Plus a ML results summarizer you can press after searching.
