We can inter Google Search to the Google Graveyard.
At its Google I/O conference on Tuesday, Google unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of Search centered around a reimagined “intelligent search box” — what the company describes as the biggest change to this entry point to the web since the search box debuted more than 25 years ago.
Instead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences at times. Google is also introducing tools that can dispatch “information agents” to gather information on a user’s behalf, along with tools that let users build personalized mini apps tailored to their needs.
↫ Sarah Perez at TechCrunch
The attack on online search has been ongoing for a long time, and it has already resulted in most people with a higher-than-average interest in technology to either no longer use Google, or just to not use online search at all. I used DuckDuckGo for a long time, until I switched to Startpage somewhere last year, and I have never looked back. Startpage (and many others like it) is a very simple, basic search engine: it just gives you a list of links. That’s it. That’s all I ever want from a search engine, as the task of then vetting each link for relevancy, accuracy, trustworthiness, and so on, is up to me, where it very well belongs.
I do not want – and the world should not want – a massive technology corporation like Google, with a deeply vested, existential interest in guiding you towards websites from the companies that pay them for ads, to guide your online browsing experience. Google Search is already riddled with ads, but at least they’re labeled and somewhat obvious. With these new “AI” chatbot-style interfaces, not only are its sources nebulous and tucked away, if they even exist at all, but they also just make shit up, fail at the most basic of tasks, and generally just suck at what they’re supposed to be doing. This will make online search with Google worse.
Worse yet, this will make it even easier for the billionaire Epstein class to sow dissent among the population, creating rifts and hatred where none should exist, solely to keep the peasants occupied fighting each other so they don’t turn their anger towards the real reason their lives suck. Panem et circenses has transformed into divide et impera, and these nebulous chatbots with complex, invisible levers and dials will only make the divide easier.
I’m afraid this move lets state-level actors, and any high-paying clients (like super PACs), obstruct and change available information at an unprecedented level. Google appears to be positioning itself as information broker, where truths can be sold to the highest bidders.
> this will make it even easier for the billionaire Epstein class to sow dissent among the population
I firmly believe Google will collude (and is colluding) with the billionaire Epstein class because they (the ultra rich) will do and pay anything to change narratives, and Google is willing to do evil for the right price. There will be no transparency around paid and “accidental” LLM hallucinations.
retrofrog,
Google specifically used to refrain from being “arbiter of truth”.
“organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” was not just a marketing statement. It was objective goal, and required objective dissemination of information.
(When we first launched the new Google News, we were happy we had “both sides” complaining they see too much of the other side. It meant our ranking alternate sources view worked)
Now… specifically for this overview
Any AI agent can have “alignment”. Long story short, it can cause not only to hallucinate (remember the “diverse” Founding Fathers of the United States?) it might even lead to active suppressing of valid but contradictory information.
I hope this new UI is optional (it is quite useful, that is certain), and we can still get “raw” results.
If you enter a Google search, the AI will decide whether to send you to AI Mode or a regular search. If you are sent to AI Mode then all you have to do is click on “All” below the search bar and you’ll get a regular search.
I am more worried, that soon, there will be no pages to find, except for Facebook links and some pay walled commercial pages
There are more pages than ever. It is just getting harder and harder to find the good ones.
Totally expected, Ai is seen as a huge risk to search (if you use a chat session and the AI looks up things for you, you don’t see ads, etc.), so they are trying to ‘innovate’. By the way the same problem exists for every ad-supported site.
I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, I find the quality of AI-generated search summaries from DuckDuckGo and Google to be a real boon — there are so many crap webpages out there now, thanks to AI (especially for anything related to food, gardening, and manufacturing, the three things I search for most) and a summary saves me from sifting through all this garbage looking for the actual useful result on page four. AI is both the problem and the solution.
On the other hand, sometimes these summaries are so laughably useless or inaccurate it makes me doubt everything it gives me. Better to just add “reddit” to the search query, or use big complicated words to bias search results toward scholarly articles (but then my novice brain needs help interpreting the papers 😀 ).
skeezix,
That’s a good way to put it. Search engines work as low level features, but the AI provides a way to build higher level abstractions that users can delegate higher level queries to, especially when it comes to personal agents. Obviously people are very divided on this, but my prediction is that society will use these tools more and more regularly – especially ordinary people going about their day and not debating or even thinking about principals. I’m already seeing a lot of uptake by people who aren’t tech savvy. Previously they would have needed to reach out to someone else for help with a task, and now AI tools are lowering the barrier for them to do more on their own – for better and for worse,
Recently I’ve been accused of ignoring / burying environmental and social issues, so I’m writing more here to rectify that. People are right to be concerned, I wouldn’t want data centers moving in next door, often with government handouts paid for by tax payer. We, the taxpayers, play a significant role in all of this. Whether it’s been apple/google/microsoft/facebook/amazon or new AI ventures, they’ve all been working with self-serving politicians to have their taxes slashed, subsidies with infrastructure built with other taxpayors footing the bill. These corporations are the reason social security is going bankrupt, we don’t have universal healthcare, and so on. The money is there but rather than the majority of it being distributed to us like it used to be, the majority is now going to build more wealth for tillionaire companies. The result being they hold mountains of money without anything to spend it on….until AI.
Investors don’t want their money to sit idly, they expect a return on investment. But this creates a conundrum for extremely wealthy corporations: how the hell can spend so much money and generate returns when they already own everything in their respective markets? AI provided the answer, opening the floodgates for decades of accumulated corporate money, ridiculous sums of it. That’s the real reason these sums are so huge, not necessarily that LLMs truly demand such huge sums of money. It’s like when Facebook spent $60B on their VR metaverse. The reason it costed $60B had almost nothing to do with what it was worth. It could have realistically been built for $60M, a whopping factor of 1000X. The reason for the $60B pricetag has less to do with what went into the metaverse and more to do with how little facebook actually values money. The same is true for all these tech giants and it explains why so much money is going into AI.
Back to our social problems, this has unfortunate consequences for everyone. Gamers and computer enthusiasts are struggling to buy hardware through unprecedented shortages and inflation. Data centers going up in people’s backyards and the associated pollution. Consumers seeing their public utility rates increasing because they now have to compete with data centers demand These are real social problems and we need to solve them, hopefully sooner rather than later.
However I think AI is being somewhat unfairly vilified as a technology. It’s not the LLM’s fault that corporations spent so much and value their money so little. AI became a catalyst giving corporations a way to solve their “infinite money glitch” problem. But I don’t think that LLMs require such ludicrous cash and resources to be viable and useful – that’s a symptom of insane corporate overspending. The result is tons of excess, inefficiency, over building, failure to optimize resources. The tech giants behind these efforts all have cash cows eliminating financial constraints and nullifying natural incentives to prioritize efficiency and optimize resources. The social consequences are real, but in my view these have less to do with LLM technology itself and much more to do with insane levels of corporate excess. And we’ve all been paying the price for it. It makes me angry, especially thinking about the opportunity cost to society. But I don’t blame LLM technology for that, the technology is ok, I blame leaders who failing to put people’s interests first and end up siphoning our resources for the benefit of a few. IMHO they are the real villains.
I mean, at some point, you might want to just buy thomfoolery.com. Not saying you’re wrong, just saying your wishes are unlikely to become reality.