Hacker News

points by RajuChacha108 5 days ago | 0 comments

Frankly this seems like a good decision to me.

Google's search is increasingly AI driven (as it should be, i do not want to click on reddit links and waste my time skimming through the 1000 comment threads), asking Google to maintain a non-AI search engine is like asking Tesla to come up with an ICE engine car right now. It is not happening.

Google Search I would expect will increasingly become more like Gemini and less like traditional search. Schools could certainly go to DuckDuckGo or other search engines that are free. (Google has shown that it does not care if they do as it sees it as a dying business.)

[–] curt15 4 days ago

That depends on whether the purpose of web search is to get answers or find references. Since students are still developing their reading and research skills, the latter goal is much more relevant in an educational setting. AI boosters have a vested interest in conditioning people to treat chatbot output as primary sources when they most certainly are not.

[–] plasticeagle 4 days ago

And what, pray tell, will this search engine search?

If nobody is visiting anything on the internet, because every search engine response is an AI output, then where will any information for this AI output come from?

This paradox was clear from day one, pretty sure I posted on here about it years ago. AI search will kill the dataset that AI itself relies upon.

[–] mapontosevenths 4 days ago

You know what's replacing the open web and reddit? Conversations with AI models that were never posted to the open web.

That's exactly why they MUST have everyone opted in, even if they don't like it.

[–] bcrl 4 days ago

Peer review is what made information on sites like Stack Overflow and reddit have value. One on one conversations with an LLM are not an equivalent and direct substitution.

[–] dzhiurgis 4 days ago

Multiply those conversations by a thousand and you got some sort of ground truth.

It's a shame they will be siloed and get biased over time. I think AI labs will come up with ways to not-compete in certain areas too.

[–] harimau777 4 days ago

The problem is that Google's AI search basically doesn't work. It routinely can't understand even simple prompts and is the only AI I've used that routinely hallucinates.

[–] Terr_ 5 days ago

> asking Google to maintain a non-AI search engine is like

...is like asking your company to maintain its SQL database instead of shoving everything into a document the LLM reads and suggests edits to.

Even if you're using an LLM to talk to the user, there still needs to be some kind of deterministic search engine back there in order to do things well, or to answer any kind of question that involves information newer than X months ago.

[–] brainwad 4 days ago

There needs to be retrieval, but ranking can be fully offloaded to LLMs and they would probably do better. Legacy search engines do both parts, and their ranking is highly gameable judging by how SEOed they are.

[–] Terr_ 4 days ago

> ranking can be fully offloaded to LLMs

If someone searches for "mexican food" you require ranking anyway because you aren't going to load those ten bazillion hits into the LLM first.

[–] brainwad 4 days ago

Spoiler: regular search ranking doesn't see very many results, either. I mean, have you seen the results for a crowded query like this? They are trash.

[–] Terr_ 4 days ago

Yeah yeah, search is hard and gets adversarial, we already knew that.

What's missing here is your imagined alternative: What exactly are trying to propose where Google can ditch having a search engine, and why do you believe it work well instead of badly?

[–] brainwad 4 days ago

Well, for some factual queries it can just know the answer inherently. Plus you can provide it all the curated data feeds that currently back first party results. But most of all, if there's no simple ranking signals to game, then SEO gets a lot harder.

[–] Personability 4 days ago

And this is good for academia?