Google changes its search box

I haven't used Google search for years. It's almost totally irrelevant at this point and existing on pure inertia.

I'm aware that most people still use it, but it's nothing like the glory days when Google was far ahead of the pack.

NYT found 10% of answers are wrong

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/technology/google-ai-over...

Why replace something deterministic with something non-deterministic? I can no longer tell someone "just google it" because I don't actually know what will come up...

Time to pay for Kagi everyone!

To change anything on the home page of google, amazon, etc, must be a hair-raising experience for the people making those changes.

I know a lot of regular people who hate this, but Kagi can be a hard sell for regular people. What are y’all’s recommendations for free search engines at the moment? I used to rec DDG, but I feel like their results are much worse than Kagi’s at present

The last product i thought google would kill, that isn't ads, the true end of an era with an underwhelming bang.

I wonder if they will stop using pagerank completely? Has pagerank already transcended the software plane?

So you can code in search now and create apps. No clue how that in depth works out. For them, the dream could be that everybody has their custom apps hosted by google.

It doesn't seem to be secure. If every google link is one step away from a prompt injection and leaking all your data, then they are worse then npm.

I wonder how many days it takes until they roll it back or put that stuff behind some extra clicks.

Thank god for Kagi. It literally saved search for me, although I mostly use kagi.com/assistant these days.

Every organization eventually is taken over by the people who operate within it effectively, to the detriment of the people who operate outside and provide the actual public value. Google’s making a terrible, though understandable, mistake. They think people go to Google to see what Google wants to show them. This is like the people who run the airport imagining that travelers are popping by to see the decorations.

They are surely hearing themselves say the same things about how Google is “everything in one place” that every failed corporation parrots on their way out.

This is to Open Claw what Google home is to Home Assistant.

I prefer the Claw like I prefer Linux and FOSS in general.

Since day one Googs’ vision was to make the Star Trek computer. They’re really there now. But I don’t like their how. This computer serves them, not me. My mind-bicycle must serve me, my thoughts are my own. I hope my resistance is not futile.

Google???

Remind me what Google is again. Haven't used them for years...

I imagine that they have made this decision based on the search queries people use, and now have the compute to make better sense of them.

We'll see if it works. I use chatgpt for complex queries, and for throaway ones I use just don't log in to it.

I wouldn't use google for the same queries, since I normally use google to find specific things, not for a chatbot.

I've been using google search, and all other products, less and less. i find a mixture of perplexity and chatgpt perform much better and find higher quality results faster.

the degoogling process will be a long haul but im determined to do it.

The “magic” of the SERP is that it makes the organics product and the ads product reinforce each other: People come for the organics and don't have to pay. That brings eyeballs, which advertisers pay for.

If Google no longer sends users to websites for free on organics, the world will have to figure out some mechanism whereby Google pays site owners for putting the information on the web in the first place. Where will that money come from?

If it's ads, the AI experience is a “lies engine” where advertisers get to pick which lies the AI tells. Not sure what kinds of people would show up for that experience. Probably the same kind who watch home shopping TV. I would venture to guess that there will be a ceiling in the advertising value of that property. Or the AI interacts with people in good faith. But then, if I'm an advertiser, how do I get my lies into the world? “We will tell your lie, only if it's a truth” doesn't work because, as an advertiser, I understand that the truth about me already gets spoken, and I don't need to pay a dime for that.

You can run an argument that people can tell ads from organics on the current SERP, and you can calibrate how much of each there should be. But you can't really “calibrate” the amount and level of the lying in the AI to where it's just enough so that people will show up, but not so much that there's no value for advertisers. You can't have little boxes either, where the AI is like “having told you the truth, I want you to also pay attention to this lie that someone paid me to tell you: …”

Is Google really saying: “Hey, we're the lion's share of the advertising market right now. But, because we kind of like these newfangled AI things, we're going to just vacate that spot to whoever. Instead, we will turn ourselves into a pre-product-market-fit company. Maybe at some point over the next 10 years, we're going to be able to tell you how we might actually monetize ourselves. Stay toooooned.”

The reason why AI is a better experience than the web right now, is because we have pre-enshittification AI and post-enshittification web. What will the whole thing look like, after enshittification is through with AI?

Google search has been over for a few years already.

Nearly all other search engines give better results with less annoying ads at the top. First thing I do when installing a new browser is switch the default search engine to duckduckgo. Duckduckgo's results are less good than google used to be, bu way better than google currently is.

> Designed to anticipate your intent, it also helps you formulate your question with AI-powered suggestions that go beyond autocomplete.

The first red flag for me. The +/- of this type of feature are well worth exploring.

Web search won't make shareholders happy.

Agentic capabilities and AI-powered interactive features in the search experience - most definitely will.

> You can still view traditional results only by selecting the “Web” tab in Google Search

I think we should still get a couple of years of life from Google. This is enough time to figure out what to do next.

The inability to do a proper search with “-x” x being a word you want excluded from the results but I can being able to have a convo about summary results is just mindblowing. I miss proper search. What’s everyone using for alternatives?

The spend difference for this must be enormous. I wonder how they justify it financially. I guess they don’t have to.

I've found Google AI Search to be good for really topical searches. And its conversational ability has noticeably improved over the last year. I can now have a (short) conversation where I reference past messages.

Google is making the pivot. And they’ve got such a strong strategic position. Full-stack integration. They will survive and thrive in this new era. Search seems safe. Yet, other products are still vulnerable to encroachment.

I use Google daily, and yet I can't remember the last time I used their search box - all of my searching has been done through the browser URL bar for a long, long time. I wonder if similar changes are being applied to the Chrome URL bar?

I started switching to DDG on some devices, this will motivate me to finish the transition ! Thanks

I think I've had this on duckduckgo for several months

Search doesn’t work well anymore anyway. Half of what used to be searchable has either been consolidated or is gated.

Gmail search doesn’t work well either. It simply doesn’t find things. Almost as if they have stopped indexing and repurposed resources towards LLMs.

And whatever there is left to index and search has been completely overrun with slop.

Search is over. Internet as we knew it is over. Something new has emerged in its place, and we are still calling the new thing the old thing.

Lesson: slowly mean yourself off Google producrs

Internet search should remain internet search. If I want to use AI, it should be an option, not a replacement of internet search.

Time to switch to old style search engines which still return the 10 blue links, with an AI option.

The unnecessary mention of Antigravity in there gives me Microsoft Copilot vibes.

Lots of people talking about Google being strictly worse than a number of search engines (bing, duck, etc) not been my experience. Brave default search is awful. Duck was terrible last I used it. Google still great for me, but I have a decent amount of "privacy controls" implemented (DNS, vpn, browser extensions) and i basically dork most searches--average search looks more like a find invocation than English. In this last regard especially, Google is peerless, imo Been a while since I looked around though. Is there an engine that supports all the operators that Google does and that provides results of better or equivalent quality?

Cool. I hope this blows up in their face and is reverted in a few months. I don't need my phone book index to suddenly not be an index and force me to use a call center instead.

Scrolling down this article presented me with pop-up dialogues twice. Annoying.

I kind of like it for dumb one off questions I dont want to burn my real tokens on...

> . And for select categories like home repair, beauty or pet care, you can ask Google to call businesses on your behalf

NO - thanks!

How is Google going to make money off this?

First signs of the death of google.

Surely, the motivation here is a mega influx of training data.

Today is the day the old internet died. RIP.

We are approaching the pinnacle of "privatize the profits, socialize the costs". No wonder the US is ruled by the straight fascists today.

There are a number of "hide AI overviews from google" browser extensions. Use them.

Even Yandex from Russia is a better search engine. But I am yet to come across a truly powerful, fair and accurate search engine.

I did not start using Google because the results were better.

I started using Google because the interface was far superior in the time before adblocking existed and after Flash existed.

Search results were better because they did not contain hidden paid results.

Search was measurably improved with the second generation of Wikipedia. Google did an excellent job understanding this and tended to just place the Wikipedia article at the top. Also helpful for Google was that Wikipedia's original search engine was useless, similar for YouTube whenever it came around.

Today, I use Google less than once per month. I'm not sure I've been there at all this year. Maybe at the end of last year I was using it and found nothing better than I found on other search engines.

So good SEO will require prompt injection now?

You can search, understand and hallucinate - do anything. All you have to do is ASK.com

How much longer can the internet survive if we just stop sending traffic to websites?

the thing that bothers me is I don't usually want this mode. When I search, I am not looking for what google thinks, I am looking for what other sources think.