Google has become so integral to online navigation that its name became a verb, meaning “to find things on the Internet.” Soon, Google might just tell you what’s on the Internet instead of showing you. The company has announced an expansion of its AI search features, powered by Gemini 2.0. Everyone will soon see more AI Overviews at the top of the results page, but Google is also testing a more substantial change in the form of AI Mode. This version of Google won’t show you the 10 blue links at all—Gemini completely takes over the results in AI Mode.
This marks the debut of Gemini 2.0 in Google search. Google announced the first Gemini 2.0 models in December 2024, beginning with the streamlined Gemini 2.0 Flash. The heavier versions of Gemini 2.0 are still in testing, but Google says it has tuned AI Overviews with this model to offer help with harder questions in the areas of math, coding, and multimodal queries.
With this update, you will begin seeing AI Overviews on more results pages, and minors with Google accounts will see AI results for the first time. In fact, even logged out users will see AI Overviews soon. This is a big change, but it’s only the start of Google’s plans for AI search.
Gemini 2.0 also powers the new AI Mode for search. It’s launching as an opt-in feature via Google’s Search Labs, offering a totally new alternative to search as we know it. This custom version of the Gemini large language model (LLM) skips the standard web links that have been part of every Google search thus far.
this sounds like what Google wanted to be since its inception: ask a question, get an answer
somewhere along the journey, the reality of needing to make money drove the enshitification of search results: ask a question, get offers to sell you an answer
this seems like a step in a better direction
Right because when I search for factual information what I really want is an LLM to tell me “sorry Dave I can’t answer that question right now.” (See: any election related information. As in it doesn’t just kick you back to the web search results it just straight up refuses to give you the answer.)
It baffles me how wholly some people are just accepting the complete erosion of the internet. I have lecturers at university, so theoretically educated people, who tell us point blank to plug any questions we have about weekly topics into ChatGPT. The respect I have for these teachers and their content is less than zero at this point.
Then you have to check those answers, so you need to search for an authoritative source anyway… which means you need a regular search engine. At that point you may as well have used the search engine in the first place.
If Google does this, you’ll need to find an alternative search engine to check Google against… so you may as well just switch to a different search engine in the first place.
There are things that LLMs are good at, being a search engine isn’t one of them. Although I have asked searchy type questions and got some interesting links back which I probably wouldn’t have found on a normal web search with the terms I was using, so they can be useful as a supplementary search tool. I’d rather that than it just giving the answers, which then need to be fact checked elsewhere.
At that point you may as well have used the search engine in the first place.
I was going to respond to this but I think you did so yourself:
I have asked searchy type questions and got some interesting links back which I probably wouldn’t have found on a normal web search with the terms I was using
I think they work as supplements and not replacements. As any tool, they have their use and (for me) can enhance my searching. But I would not replace it with only LLM. (Altough I have never had any great luck with ChatGPT and links, they never work - as in ChatGPT give me an anchor element without any link. It’s better at providing me search terms and concepts to look up for what I need.)
Google search results are so terrible that at this point it’s a mercy.
Thanks Google, I hate it. At least the udm=14 trick and website still works, at least until google decides to stop supporting that feature. Definitely going to be using that more and more if this becomes the default google experience.
You can also use startpage. They use Google services without AI
I hate this.
DuckDuckGo is pretty easy to switch to. You can go to settings and disable AI chat in it.
Ew, it is still on by default :( Unless you set your browser to save site data for thos site, you would still see the AI :( Fortunately, the Javascriptless version has no such pest.
I noticed Edge would only show me corporate/authority friendly results recently as well oddly cutting down the number of results I see to a very unnaturally short amount of results.
Deleting it and moving to DuckDuckGo which while the corporate friendly things were still at the top, it at least showed me some opposition results.
Guessing Edge by default sent you to Bing, no surprise the DDG results look similar, given that they use Bing under he hood. They shuffle rankings slightly, but it’s the same index.
Of all the sources of truth, why pick auto-complete?
When I use a web search tool I want to look at the websites themselves. Not having to go through Gemini (the AI not the protocol) telling me what IT thinks I want…
Assuming AGI ever develops and bothers to sift through data. I’ve no problem with AI as a tool (that is, Dumb AI like we currently have.)
When I’m doing a web search rather than actually calling up Gemini (The AI not the Protocol) I want a WEB SEARCH… that means I am not looking to use AI. I’m wanting to use OI (Organic Intelligence.)
I don’t really get Google’s angle since it’s pretty obvious that their AI search sucks. Maybe it’s just to impress shareholders?
I mean, they’re ruining their search anyways. It’s almost unusable at this point, it’s like asking for relevant ads and two year old Reddit posts
Is it censorship? Did they decide to just straight up sell SEO? Are websites locking down and blocking their crawlers to stop AI training crawlers?
I legitimately find Bing to be better at this point, but whatever they’re doing it’s maddening. Even better AI assisted web searches kinda suck because the data fed into them is more of the same
But solid chance they’re trying to boost Gemini, which has been a shockingly bad llm for a company that basically wrote the book on AI not too long ago
There’s also the problem that there’s much more noise in the web nowadays—it has been growing exponentially and people try to manipulate the search engines. It becomes more difficult to filter out that’s good and what’s bad. Be too strict and you risk missing valuable but less polished information. Be too lenient, and you drown in low-quality, SEO-optimized content that prioritizes visibility over usefulness.
This makes sense to me. All other reasons presented sound like wishful thinking that google is still the same company from 2005
Does EVERY axis in life have to be fucked up at the same time?
Can we have one thing that is just doing ok?
Government - fucked.
Education - fucked.
Healthcare - fucked.
Environment - fucked.
Societal and Social Cohesion - fucked.
Wealth Inequality - fucked.
Personal Technological Autonomy - fucked, and under continuous attack.
Technological Enshittification - Running like gangbusters. So really - fucked.
Damn, someone give me some kind of ladder to climb out of this pit of despair.
Every single one of these flows from wealth inequality.
Excellent point!
They also flow from corruption (regulatory capture/failure to enforce anti-trust and other consumer-protection law). It’s hard to say whether that is itself a cause or result of wealth inequality, though.
Nintendo, when chasing developers of emulators and modders, uses regulatory mechanisms. IP is such a mechanism initially. Intended to protect the little guy from big bad corporations.
It’s hard to say whether that is itself a cause or result of wealth inequality, though.
It’s both of course. Only time flows in one direction and never the other.
(and reinforces it)
No.
And yet, resistance seems very weak…
That’s weird – we water our soil with nutrients like “there’s no point in voting”, “they’re all out to get us”, “politicians are shit”, “nothing changes”, “governments are bad”.
I wonder why people haven’t been motivated to fight. Whenever they express faith in our leaders, or institutions, or have any positivity, we’re quick to shut them down. But still.
People need hope to fight. We’ve become so black-pilled about everything that many people think it’s impossible for anything to improve.
It’s a reminder about why we need balance. Yes, there are a lot of problems. But not everything is fucked. There’s still a propose to fighting for a better future.
Every civilization rises and falls. We’re on the down slope ATM. Sorry. The 80s and 90s were pretty nice in America!
That feel when the Matrix actually called it
I’m from India so two more things to add to the list
Air - fucked.
Cleanliness - megafucked.
The ladder has been privatized.
You get the greased pole.
I know it isn’t much, but services like mastodon, lemmy, kbin, friendica, Peertube, etc have shown me there is connected pushback.
Tilde communities have given me something smaller scale to focus on.
The heck is tilde??
Text explaination. My ADHD brain doesnt have the patience for a video when I just want to know the answer and move on.
https://machaddr.substack.com/p/the-tildeverse-a-brief-overview
The https://tildeverse.org is an online community comprising several servers, known as tilde communities, where users can engage in a wide variety of activities that harken back to the early days of the internet. The term “tilde” refers to the Unix/Linux tradition of using
~(the tilde symbol) as shorthand for a user’s home directory. Each tilde community is typically hosted on a Unix-based system, and these servers provide access to shell accounts and a range of tools to help users communicate, collaborate, and explore computing in a text-based, terminal-driven environment.
Does EVERY axis in life have to be fucked up at the same time?
Yes. There are many texts written on this since start of writing, some are written down from what was carried in word before that since start of speaking.
Don’t forget about housing! Can’t even have shelter from the elements without paying through the nose to some rent-raising billionaire or giant corporation…
Updated! :)
Time to turn inside. Whatever around you gets fucked, essentially no one can order you “be miserable”. If this one thing gets fixed a hundred percent your way, the rest is just a question of what you can do and how much of that you are willing to do
But does it seem a very long road to become fully in control of own interiority.
I did not come up with this on my own, just picked if up from someone else, but can’t argue with it
Problems exist, but there’s never been a safer time to be a homosapien on Earth. A book called Abundance helped me gain a little perspective in these gloomy days.
safety because more people are alive? but also most dangerous because more people die daily than at any other time
Thanks, I’ll check it out, though it’s going to take more than motivational books to pull the US out of the current nosedive…
Is DuckDuckGo still the best alternative at this point, or has Bing been toiling away in the dark to improve itself?
DDG uses Bing under the hood for the main results, so it doesn’t really matter too much in terms of results.
I’m so glad I switched to Kagi. The writing was on the wall once they started rolling out the AI suggestions wide.
Is there any escape from shitty AI slop in my search results?
What search engines are there that I can use that arent a proxy for one of the big ones? And yes I know about Kagi, I’d prefer open source if possible.
There’s not really a strong player in the open source search space.
Mwmnl exists, but per their own readme:
The quality is a long way’s off from matching the commercial engines at the moment
Kagi provides the source code for many of their services, but is not truly open source, especially because at its core, it relies on applying its own rankings to other’s indexes.
That said, search is a space where the old adage rings true:
If you’re not paying for it; you are the product!
For what it’s worth, I find value in my Kagi subscription.
There’s a new beta one which only uses its own index: https://stract.com/
And best of all it’s written in Rust.
Moving from enshitified closed source to a different closed source that’s trying to position itself as user first isn’t necessarily bad.
Maybe something to use only for fun, but check out Marginalia. It’s open source and as far as I know, runs in the guy’s computer at his house. It deprioritizes commercial websites and boosts small blogs instead.
Every time I go there I find something genuinely interesting or cozy to read.
Can it be worse than the sanitised results they give you now?
Yes absolutely
Do people still use google? I haven’t touched it for yonks now. Except GRIS, that still works well.
Not the search but I’m still stuck with the email. :/
Alphabet/Google needs to fire their CEO. He’s an obvious idiot, not good with employees, not good with investors, and not good at lobbying. That’s like 99% of a CEO’s job. Just get rid of him and Google’s stock price will probably jump 20%.
