Comment by nutrientharvest
2 hours ago
Like it or not, this is exactly what normies have always wanted out of search engines - a little guy in their computer they can talk to for answers, advice and reassurance. They've always been trying to use Google Search this way and have been confused and annoyed that it doesn't work. And now it does! It's a massive quality of life improvement for the average user and a huge product win for Google.
Its also why Google Search "went to shit years ago"
Technically adept people would search using ordered keywords and phrases, which would have excellent results with Google 2006:
Dario Turkey NBA "never coming over"
But regular people agonized over this because to them a search was
What were some of the memes about Dario staying in turkey
Google put immense effort into calibrating search for regular people instead of engineers.
If you are a fast typer, maybe the longer query might just come out naturally.
If you are properly lazy, you must expect or at least attempt to get results for the shorter query. Especially on a phone.
Christ, thank you! I’ve been saying this for years and no one I’ve spoken to, even engineers, could acknowledge the level of “chunking” that’s been engrained in them over the years for turning inquiries into keyword/phrase shorthand, and that this is NOT something most people want to do, and is the killer app of Google AI. This time around, you CAN type in an input box what you would say to a human in everyday conversation, AND expect a reasonable response. That’s invaluable to a casual user.
I've always felt that "proper" LLM use for search would be two boxes: You describe what you want in the first, and it proposes search terms in the second, and then those get executed.
Yes, the average person might not care about the second box... Until they need to because the results are wrong. Plus showing them in tandem would help people learn.
I'm not sure about this. I know complete normies that lament how bad Google is now and how often the search is useless. I think many people just want search to search.
Like, today, or the pre-chatgpt age where all the common questions have been spammed to death by SEO farms?
Google's search has been frustratingly awful for quite some time now, long before AI.
So if enough 737's crash into the water Boeing will start making submarines? Product managers deserve a special express queue when in line for the Warm Place.
>So if enough 737's crash into the water Boeing will start making submarines?
Maybe?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-it_note
>In 1968, Spencer Silver, a scientist at 3M in the United States, attempted to develop a super-strong adhesive. [...]
>Post-its were launched across the United States in 1980.[20][21] The following year, they were launched in Canada and Europe.[22] Post-it Notes as we know them were patented by Fry in 1993 as a "repositionable pressure-sensitive adhesive sheet material".[23]
Another one that to me is equally impressive: instant glues
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanoacrylate
The first thorough research went into them when looking for new clear plastics, and this route of making them was ruled out because it would rather stick to everything than ease the production of objects with nice optical properties. The story goes, it was so annoying to work with that it was initially shelved, and only years after being considered again and ruled out again for a different project, the utility of its reliable and fast bonding was fully appreciated.
No, we did not want it to offer weirdly irrelevant fake sympathy. We just wanted to talk in plain English and get relevant answers back in plain English, without us having to reel it it from going down some emotionally schizophrenic rabbit hole (like in TFA).
In TFA the chatbot got confused, and the author never decided to correct it with "no I'm trying to find an old tweet about NBA Dario" which a normie would do, and be satisfied with the result.
always the same response: "you're holding it wrong"
1 reply →
I'm going to agree and disagree.
I agree that plain language queries is what people wanted. We've been seeing Google shift in that direction for well over a decade. And of course people are looking towards search engines for answers. There may be different expectations for where those answers are coming from, and there are cases where people are simply trying to source information, but those differences are likely just noise as far as Google is concerned.
I don't agree with people expecting advice or reassurance from a search engine. There will be some people who do that. It may even be a sizeable number of people. But using this article as an example that a majority of people want such a thing is silly.
I mean, look at the query. To the author, it was an attempt to source information. Yet the author also realised that the reader would need context to understand why Google's response was weird in their mind. What they failed to do was give context to Google, so the LLM interpreted it as asking for social advice.
New technology requires new approaches. It's as simple as that.
The big selling point of Google used to be that their fuzzy search was significantly better than just about anyone else, and you could do advanced query filters. Now if you do that, because showing the user zero results is unacceptable, you’ll get all sorts of crap that “doesn’t contain” your query - the results say so!
But anthropomorphic interfaces have been around for a while, from Clippy to the Windows 10+ installers that refer to the royal We during setup.
> What they failed to do was give context to Google
The context is: "I'm using the premier web-search engine of the internet to search for things on the internet the same way that zillions of people have searched for things on the internet for 20 years."
It's not missing, Google simply chose to build something new that will ignore it because they're trying to alter the relationship.
Yeah - exactly this. And yet people still say they've lost the AI race because Gemini 3.5 Pro or whatever has not been released yet... And here we are with fast and decent AI being served to and used by billions of people (most without them probably even realising), making ever-increasing revenue, gaining back market share etc. Who cares if their coding models are not as good as opus 5.5 when they're printing more and more money every quarter.
Gemini is easily the single most popular LLM family used in the world, period.
As in, it probably has 90% of the market share. Possibly even 99%, going by number of prompts made.
This is not a “gotcha” kind of argumentative question, I am genuinely asking curiously: is the AI overview and AI lens thing really making Google lots of money?
It's true that Google is still very successful, but simply calling their AI a successful product misses the full picture. Their flagship product has always been and continues to be advertising, the AI overview is only there to pull people away from ChatGPT and, similar to ChatGPT itself, is not a product the vast majority of people would be interested in paying for - it exists only as a sort of loss leader to keep people looking at ads, and is not making any sort of profit on its own (quite the contrary, I imagine it's pretty expensive to run every query through an LLM, even if it's a small one.)
AI labs have long since realized that the only real path to direct profitability is coding, and in this, Google have indeed fallen behind.
You can, of course, argue that none of this matters as long as the whole is making a profit, but I think the distinction is important.
When I was in grade 8 and 9 in public school, we'd got a couple random lessons in the library on the computers learning to search online databases and catalogues. For most of us it was our introduction to keyword matching and boolean logic. Sadly, instead of continuing teaching, services have instead phased out those basic operators and here we are. We also learned to make websites using Pagemaker and edit the generated html, that was just fun.
I absolutely despise when people cite google as a source, especially now where 90% of the time they're citing the LLM overview. The old answer widget was at least a direct quote from some website.
This is also why even lowest-intelligence emoji spamming slop models from ChatGPT are a massive hit
and something like 3% of LLM userbase pays to get access to the higher tier models with actual useful thinking
If it's thinking I want, I can do that myself. Chat bots are occasionally useful search tools, but thinking doesn't really help with that. So why pay?
No it isn't.
The debate doesn't end there yet because what's considered a "scam" is a point on the gradient of user acceptance.
Too many users still reject this for it to not be a scam. The highest acceptance is from boomers and the delusional. Neither group gives a shit if AI actually works because they don't have work to do.