alt Hacker NewsI think we've reached a point where reading the AI summary (which I think is Gemini Flash Lite) is probably going to be more reliable than actually reading the top 10 search results. The top 10 search results were often blogspam even in a pre-AI world. I feel like either you trust Google to retrieve information or you don't (and Gemini has problems but so does Google Search, and are you really sure the latter is worse than the former?)
It has been over a decade since Google Search was anything but a machine-learning powered word association engine. I miss old Google Search but it's dead and I trust Gemini more than what Search has turned into.
Replies
Why would a summary of unreliable blogspam results be more reliable than the blogspam results themselves?
I find it easier to recognize bullshit from its source vs an LLM's confident and well written regurgitation of it.
If you searched, whats my ip, you used to get your ip. Now you get an ai answer telling you to use one of the websites. How is that helpful?
Absolutely. Google has shown the courage to admit that their bread and butter business is changing permanently. they are adapting which the large cos rarely do.
My mother never used search. She found it too hard to manage. She uses Gemini all the time, it gives answers in her language and she does not need to type. She is incredibly happy.
My daughter talks to Gemini. The idea of going through links seems primitive to her.
The future of interface is chat/talking not going through clickbait.
I think schools should have some basic control on how kids can use AI but saying that they want to freeze the learning experience in 2020 is simply not right. It is like saying we wont allow whiteboards and markers.
I haven't checked this month, but the few times I used Google Search this year I saw egregious errors in the AI summary ~50% of the time. Things like confidently citing a statistic whose number appeared in the top 10 results, but misrepresenting what it pertains to.
The AI summary is just summarizing the top results. It’s not Gemini.
So I can’t understand how one would trust the summary but not what is being summarized.
From my experience it's worse than any of the normal Gemini models
Not my experience at all. I can usually trust chatgpt or Claude to give me accurate answers for queries but google summaries are frequently wrong
A recent study from oumi.ai found that the summaries contradict the sources they cite 10% of the time.
Use Kagi, it mostly excludes spam.
Google is trying to behaviorally condition children.
The relative effectiveness of the search is immaterial.
This is gross.
All we’re doing is adding another layer between us and the information. Google flash is still pulling on the same poor information. But it’s not as good at discerning what is useful and what is not as we are (people going way too far out on a limb outside of their domain expertise not withstanding, which is another part of the problem and why this stuff can be dangerous)
Can’t access the article, but would assume the schools are more concerned about students having Google AI doing their work for them, rather than concern about using the AI summary for search results?
at least before I was able a find a blog post or a discussion or fleck of documentation. Now I've pretty much stopped using Google because I've wasted so much time having been assured by Gemini that something is entirely possible when in fact its very much not. now I have to dig to find the canonical reference for a question, at least SEO people didn't spend a lot of energy trying to front rust crates.
This is all very tragic. we built a magic network where we could stash all the worlds information and access it from anywhere, except its been trashed by people with sleazy motivations trying to get between us and what we'd like to see.
That is NOT my experience. I used to have a dump of screenshots where Google AI from search is absolutely wrong. In my experience, it doesn't work and "quoting" things never told in the source (the exact contrary sometime), responding in hindi, responding in spanish, responding in mix of languages.
Most of the time it's quicker, sometimes it's just bad.